Joshua Touster Photography

Joshua Touster (1954-Present)

I was born in NYC in 1954, the first of two sons to Irwin and Sondra Touster. Three years later, my brother David was born. Our family lived on the upper westside of Manhattan. We were an artistic household; my father was an artist and teacher, and my mother a voracious reader who would spend most of her professional life working in book publishing. Much of my youth was spent visiting museums and galleries and seeing films at the New Yorker movie theater and the Museum of Modern Art. I remember attending my dad’s art openings and the excitement I felt in my designated job of placing a red dot next to each piece of work that had just been sold. At the age of seven, my parents divorced. My Mom, David and I moved to an apartment on the upper eastside, while my dad moved into one across the park on the upper westside of the city.

My father was always creating games for my brother and I as a way to keep us occupied. We would walk down to the toy store on Broadway to play a game Dad called “Who can point out...” and David and I would then look for the chosen item in the window. Whomever was the first to point it out would win. The game also seemed a good way to keep us kids busy so we wouldn't ask to go inside the store to buy something.

Dad was always trying to get us boys involved in art projects, and was quite successful in doing so. He would show us how to draw, paint, sculpt, and make films and he set up a darkroom in the back bathroom of his apartment for me to develop and print photographs and photograms. When I was eleven my father held an art opening for our work. I exhibited photograms, my cousin Dan exhibited photographs, and David showed sculpture. Food was served, and red dots were placed on the walls.

At the age of 12, I was given my fathers Asahi-Flex camera, and I shot with it for about two years before trading it in at Camera Barn in midtown Manhattan, for a Nikkormat body with a 50mm 1.4 lens. At thirteen, I began regularly carrying my camera; focusing my lens on strangers, NYC street scenes, rock and roll concerts, and counter cultural events, and photographed on a summer’s trip that I took to Israel the year following my Bar Mitzvah.

During my sophomore year of high school I, along with David, Mom, her new husband Al, and his kids from a previous marriage, moved from NYC to Great Neck, Long Island. I hated living in the suburbs, so every weekend, despite my mom's pleading to make a life in my new hometown, I would take the train into the city, to meet friends, wander the streets, and take photographs.

At the age of sixteen my family moved to Los Angeles. I put down my still camera and for the next two summers, while staying with my father back in NYC, would make 16mm films at the Henry Street Settlement, a not-for-profit social service agency on the lower east side of Manhattan. After two years of filmmaking I decided that the process of filmmaking was too slow, cumbersome, and expensive, and I missed the spontaneity and immediacy that still photography offered.

In 1972, after graduating from high school, I attended the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Realizing immediately that a conventional college education was not for me, and that I would probably be moving on after a year, I transferred from the required, impersonal lecture classes that had been assigned to me, and into much smaller, seminar-based classes.

The following year, I transferred to The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington, a small, experimental, liberal arts state school that offered evaluations instead of grades, and espoused a basic philosophy of interdisciplinary learning. That first year I took classes in boat building and Russian literature, DJ'ed a jazz show on KAOS, the school's radio station, and played classical flute.

One day, during my second year in Olympia, I dusted off my trusty Nikkormat camera, walked around Olympia shooting photographs, and immediately fell in love with taking photographs again. Two months later, back in NYC for Christmas break, I photographed strangers on the street with my Nikkormat and a borrowed 24 mm wide angle lens. From that time forward I would carry a camera with me almost every day.

During my third and final year at Evergreen, my days were filled with shooting, attending seminars, reading literature, immersing myself in the history of photography, and spending insane amounts of time in the school's darkroom.

After graduating from Evergreen in 1976, and not sure of where to settle, I moved into an old farmhouse on a four acre piece of property that my father had purchased six years earlier in Woodstock NY. I set up a darkroom in the downstairs bedroom, and began freelancing for a few of the local newspapers in the area. Assignments were few and far between, and once the weather started to turn cold, it didn’t take me very long to realize that living in the country had become much too isolating for me. I moved back to NYC, and into a small 73rd Street eastside apartment that had a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in the closet. With my dad’s help I landed a job working in the darkrooms at Parsons School of Design, mixing chemicals and teaching students how to print. I also audited a seminar run by photographer Lisette Model.

Returning to my Parsons darkroom job after Europe, I began applying to graduate schools, and spent the next year printing four separate portfolios of thirty-five, 11”x14” black and white prints, one for each of the schools I was applying to. In the spring of 1976 I was accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design's MFA program in Photography. That fall, after spending the summer working in the coffee and cheese departments at Zabar’s Deli and Gourmet Grocery, I left New York and moved to Providence RI.

Upon arriving at RISD, I took a color photography class with Sprint Chemistry inventor and teacher Paul Krot, and switched from shooting in black and white to color. Me and my fellow first year grad students attended teacher Wendy Snyder McNeil's weekly critique session, and participated in Bill Parker’s Photo Iconography class, which focused on photo history and aesthetics. I also assisted a second year grad student in teaching an Intro To Photography course.

Around this time, I began to concentrate on exhibiting my work, and nine of my color photographs were chosen to be included in the first annual Emerging Photographers exhibition at the Catskill Center of Photography in Woodstock NY.

In the middle of my first year at RISD I purchased a used Leica M4 rangefinder camera with a 35mm Summicron lens, and stopped shooting with my SLR Nikkormat. For the next twenty seven years, until I switched to shooting digitally in 2005, the Leica became my go-to camera for the majority of my everyday, and non-commercial shooting.

During my second year at RISD I continued to shoot in color, taught my own Intro To Photography course, and with fellow classmate Drex Brooks, co-curated exhibitions at the school’s photography gallery.

After receiving my MFA degree in the spring of 1980, I taught courses at Rhode Island Community College, had two Boston one-person exhibitions, and as usual, continued to photograph.

In January of 1982 I moved from Providence to Los Angeles, and lived in a small bungalow off of Sunset Boulevard before moving into a rent-controlled apartment near the beach in Santa Monica. I landed a job in Hollywood, and for the next eight months developed black and white movie film for the special effects house, Robert Abel and Associates. It would be the only full-time, 9 to 5 job that I would ever hold.

After leaving Abel’s, I was hired to teach photography part time at both Woodbury University and West LA College. I also lectured on my work at Chino State Prison, continued to exhibit my work in both local and national exhibitions, and began shooting freelance photo assignments, including weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, which I continued to do on and off for the next four decades.

In 1983, I started shooting for, and quickly became, the principle photographer for two publications; The LA Reader, an independent alternative newspaper with a circulation of over 60,000, who's concentration was on news, culture, and entertainment, and CitySports Magazine, an oversized weekly which focused on personal fitness and health. My association with CitySports gave me access to photograph many sporting events, and led to a number of personal projects of mine on the Los Angeles professional sports teams the Lakers, Dodgers, and Raiders.

The following year, in 1984, I landed the biggest assignment of my freelance career to date; five weeks traveling with and photographing Michael Jackson’s Victory Tour, for the book On the Road with Michael. My photographs were widely published and reviewed, and the series was shown in my one-person exhibit, The Tour, at the Citiscape FotoGallery in Pasadena CA. I was also one of 100 photographers chosen for the project 24 Hours in the Life of Los Angeles, and I had nine photographs included in that historic book.

In 1985, I traveled to Boston to document a 90 mile walk for peace that coincided with the 40th anniverary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My project, Peace Walk, would be exhibited in the gallery at Woodbury University, and was reviewed in numerous LA publications.

After five years of living in Los Angeles, tired of the constant sunshine and lack of seasons, and needing to take the next step in my photography career, I packed up my west coast life, and moved east to Boston, Massachusetts.

Upon arriving in Boston, I began a relationship with Kathy Brown, who would become my longterm partner, and along with our two cats, Miles and Okra, rented the first floor of a two-family house, abutting a golf-course in Watertown MA. That house would average five broken windows per season from errant golf balls. In 1997 we purchased a single-family home abutting the same golf-course, but this time a safer distance from the tee.

Each summer, beginning in 1992, Kathy and I would spend time on Maine's Swans Island. The photos that I took on the island became part of my ongoing project, Every Summer.

I began freelancing for numerous publications in the New England area. I landed jobs with business publications, hospitals, educational institutions, shot on Outward Bound dogsled and boat trips, and was one of the two principal photographers for Diehard: The Magazine with Sox Appeal. My association with Diehard allowed me access to Boston Red Sox games and the opportunity to begin a new baseball project, Life at Fenway. When CitySports Magazine began publishing a Boston edition, I once again became their principal photographer, leading to projects on the New England Patriots and Boston Celtics, as well as shooting the Boston Marathon every year. I also received a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council to photograph local sports within the Cambridge city limits. After the completion of photography for the grant, the work was exhibited in the Cambridge town hall’s Cambridge Arts Gallery.

I continued to teach photography part-time at numerous institutions in and around Boston, including The Decordova Museum, New England School of Photography, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and for eight years as a part-time faculty member in the art department at Curry College. Following a 1999-2001 stint as a part-time visiting faculty member at Wellesley College, I made the decision to stop teaching, and thereafter put all of my energy into my freelance and personal photography.

My work for hospitals and healthcare organizations in the New England area continued to expand. When I heard that Massachusetts General Hospital was looking to hire freelance photographers, I met with the Development department's graphic designer, Arch MacInnes, and began a forty year relationship photographing for MGH, as well as a lifelong friendship with Arch, who would go on to design a number of my photography books.

In 1988, at about the time I began photographing the first of my many MGH annual reports, my mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. While shooting the inner workings of a major Boston hospital during the week, I would travel on weekends to NYC to work on another type of healthcare project, but this time from a very different perspective; that of a grieving family member documenting the illness and death of my mother. The Mom series would later be shown in a one-person exhibition at Wellesley College.

Except for the Everyday photographs that I was shooting, and a few small projects concentrating on Boston area sports, it had been many years since I had committed fully to an in-depth, longterm personal project. That all changed in 2005.

Music had always played a major role in my life, and I had been photographing performances since I was a teenager. In 2005 I shot a concert at Boston's Paradise Rock Club that included the opening night’s band, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, who I became enamored with during that first shoot. From 2005 through 2012, I would document Potter's rise in popularity every chance I could, and titled the finished project, Grace Notes.

In 2006, I began another personal project, documenting a year in the life of the minor league baseball team, the Brockton Rox, which culminated in my first book of photographs, A Season On The Rox. The work was shown in one-person exhibitions at Ohio’s Kenyon College art gallery and Boston's Logan Airport, and was chosen for permanent display at the Boston Garden’s Sports Museum.

The following year, in 2007, I began shooting the racing life at Boston’s historic thoroughbred horse-racing track, Suffolk Downs. Although I only planned on spending one season shooting at the track, I ended up photographing there for the next thirteen years, shooting more than 500,000 images. Suffolk Downs would be the last remaining track in the New England area to close it’s gates to live racing, and I named the mammoth project I was working on, The Last Racetrack. In 2008 I exhibited the series at the Newton Library Art Gallery, and in 2011 the work was presented in a one-person show at Ivan Karp's infamous OK Harris Gallery in NYC, a space that I had always hoped to exhibit in.

While continuing to photograph at Suffolk Downs, I spent time shooting at the renowned Saratoga Race Course in both 2008 and 2009, and in 2010 I received a two week, artist-in-residency at the art colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, right down the road from the track, to continue my Saratoga Race Course project. The photographs I shot at Saratoga Race Course made up my second book, Three Weeks in August, which was designed by Arch MacInnes, and published and financed by iocolor of Seattle WA.

I had grown up listening to 1960's rock and roll, so when I discovered the band Phish I began attending their shows. In 2009, after Phish returned from a five year hiatus, I attended a concert of their’s at Fenway Park. I was drawn to the band's similar vibe to that of the Grateful Dead, and from 2009-2012, whenever possible, I would photograph Phish shows and the scene that surrounded the band. The work culminated in my project, Phishing Trip.

When one of my oldest friends, Scott was diagnosed with Melanoma in 2011, I began a four year project documenting his declining health from the deadly disease, and the close relationship he had with his brother Guy, who I was also extremely close to. My photo series, Scott and Guy, culminated with Scott's death in 2014.

Back in 1970, my father had purchased a four acre piece of property in Woodstock NY, and every summer he would live and paint in the barn on the property. In 2005, when dad became unable to navigate the hardships of barn living, I became it’s caretaker, and besides taking care of the place, spent the next twelve years intently photographing the property. The work became an homage to a place that played such an important role in the life of both my father and myself. The series, Our Place In The Country, concluded with the selling of the property in 2018.

Ever since the completion of my 1985 Peace Walk series, I had been looking for another project that spoke to the ever-present social unrest taking place in the country. In 2011 I began documenting Occupy Boston after the occupation had moved into downtown Boston's Dewey Square, with a tent city set up directly across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. For the next five months, until the Dewey Square tent city and the occupation was dismantled by the Boston Police, I spent almost every day documenting the life of Occupy Boston. In addition to Boston’s Occupy movement, I also spent time photographing the movement's takeover of New York City's Zucotti Park, and Providence, Rhode Island’s Burnside Park.

I had photographed the Boston Marathon many times in the past, but in 2013, when two bombs exploded at the finish-line killing three people, I had been out of town. Two days later I began to photograph the makeshift memorials that had begun to spring up on the streets to honor the victims, and for the next three years I would continue to document the aftermath of the bombings, and the effect it had on the local community. In April 2014, the Boston Public Library presented Dear Boston, an exhibition of artifacts from the makeshift memorials, and many of my photographs were included, and central, to the exhibition. I also lectured on the work at the BPL, and other libraries across the state. In 2016 I self-published my book, Aftermath: The Boston Marathon Bombings, and donated hundreds of copies to libraries across the New England area, and to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund.

When my father, the artist Irwin Touster landed in a NYC emergency room with heart failure in 2016, I began an in-depth photo essay on his decline and death. With his passing in 2017, I began the process of organizing and documenting his life's work, and during the 2020 pandemic I completed a three year legacy project which culminated in a website of my father’s life as an artist.

After Donald Trump became president in 2017, I started to photograph many of the protests that were taking place. Beginning with the historic Women’s March the day following Trump’s inauguration, and continuing with protests concentrating on climate change, gun violence, political and corporate corruption, the Black Lives Matter movement, and defend abortion rallies and marches, I would spend the next five years photographing many of the protest events that took place during the Trump presidency, and following the January 6th assault on the US Capital.

In 2019, I began a project documenting the up-and-coming jam band Neighbor's weekly Tuesday night residency at a small Somerville MA music club, Thunder Road. Six months later I also began to photograph the residency of another band, Club d'Elf, who had been playing bi-weekly for the past 22 years at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge MA. Both residencies ended when the pandemic closed the clubs in 2020, but unlike Thunder Road which was demolished, the Lizard Lounge would reopen in 2022, and Club d’Elf would continue to play there.

In March of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic exploded, all of my upcoming commercial photo assignments and personal projects came to a grinding halt. No longer interacting with many people outside of my immediate circle, I began to photograph on long, daily walks, documenting my everyday observations in a world engulfed by the pandemic. I also focused my lens on the unusual proliferation of animal and bird life, brought on by a lack of human presence brought on by the pandemic. The photographs became two separate series of mine: The Pandemic Diaries (2020-2022), and 10 Mile Radius (2020-2021).

In 2021, I began to compile my life's work into a web-site. This is that project.