TWOSOMES
"IT WAS SERENDIPITY, not chance, that brought Mark Chester’s photographs together in perfect pairs.
Chester, now a professional photographer, picked up a camera in 1968 when he was about to leave for the Kingdom of Tonga with the Peace Corps. Although he dropped out during training and never made it to Tonga, he kept his film Nikon F camera.
In his 40 years of traveling across the country and the world since then, he took thousands of photographs, filling two filing cabinets with contact sheets, the prints of negative strips. From these photographs, he picked out a pattern:
'When I was doing an exhibition, I would put all the framed images on the floor under the wall that they would go on and change them around. The idea that struck me [was] that they went together better as a pair rather than on the wall by itself,' he says.
His new book, Twosomes, is a collection of these serendipitous matches, 101 pairs of clever, complementary photographs. Some are obvious, others are understated, but all are tinged with mischief and show a sense of humor.
A shot of a logging train is paired with rolls of tissue paper in a restroom in a before-and-after twosome. A Speedo-clad man with his head stuck in a phone booth in Rio de Janeiro visually plays off a photo of a pig with his head stuffed in a pail in upstate New York.
His twosomes of people are especially powerful. In one pairing, two pipe-smoking men in a boat in western Sweden find a twin in a leathery-skinned tribal woman enjoying a pipe in the Philippines.
What Chester hopes viewers will take away from the book is, of course, a second glance, he says.
'I just hope that people look at it again.'"
DIG BOSTON: BOOK REVIEW
Heather Vandenengel on Twosomes (Un-Gyve Press)
