Born in Seattle, Washington and raised in Montana, Rodger Kingston has lived in Massachusetts since 1968. He has shown extensively throughout the United States, and his photographs are in many collections, including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and the National Gallery of American Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, both in Washington, DC.
In his 1989 exhibition catalog “Larger Than Life: The Celebrity Series,” photographic historian Estelle Jussim wrote, “Rodger Kingston’s pictures are visual poems, strong, meticulous…. He is an artist without pretensions, finding beauty and complexity in popular imagery, and he pursues his findings with an admirable affection.”
Museum curator, author, and photographic historian Clark Worswick has stated that Rodger Kingston “… is amongst the best artists that America has ever offered: for his generosity of’ spirit: for the blast of adrenalin I get from his encounters with ‘the great ordinary of American vernacular’: for his sense of history in photography: and for his deep sense of proportion, common sense, and uncommon humor.”
Worswick continues, about Kingston’s latest book, “New American Photographs, “Rodger’s point of departure for this book is [Walker] Evans “American Photographs” … what a thing to stand up to, and to actually be able to prevail in this space. Amazing… simply amazing to pull this off. This is a sheer bravado performance!”
His most recent museum exhibition, “Along the Right of Way: Landscapes from a Train,” showed at the Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA, in 2002, and his 1998 exhibition, “Fifty Years on the Mangrove Coast: Photographs by Walker Evans and Rodger Kingston,” traveled to five Florida museums over a period of two years.
” A Walker Evans scholar, Kingston is the author of “Walker Evans In Print: An Illustrated Bibliography.” He has a Masters Degree in Education from Harvard University.