About Me
My name is John Koster and I’m a photographer and writer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’m old enough to retire from my daytime job this year and that’s my plan so I can move into fulltime creation with both. I’ve been a football player, I’ve got a few powerlifting records from years ago, I was a monk for a couple of years, a social worker, a cop, and most recently spent the last six years working in sale and doing photography whenever I could.
At one point, I came really close to leaving my day job and working fulltime in photography doing weddings, events, senior pics, corporate headshots and started taking on more and more, until I realized the last thing I wanted to do when I had free time was pick up my camera and do my own street work or my studio fine art work. Plus, I hated doing weddings and corporate head shots. What a pain in the ass. I stuck with my day job in business development and spent a lot of time daydreaming about the creative projects I wanted to take on and all the things I could do with my free time, and that was more workable for me. I didn’t buy a shitty little camera thirteen years ago to make a living with it, I bought a shitty camera just because I wanted to take pictures of things that I found interesting and beautiful, and that’s it.
In 2011 I found myself on the west coast, living in San Francisco, traveling all over Northern California, Northern Nevada and Colorado working in sales management for a global company. I found myself in a rented condo, with all these white walls surrounding me, and wanting to put something on the walls. At first, I checked out some art sites online, and then I picked up my camera and decided I’d make colorful images and get them printed out and put them up on my walls. And that’s what I did, until one day, while walking in downtown San Francisco, I walked right into the tenderloin district and began taking pictures of all the people I came across in one of the worst urban places in the US.
It was then that I fell in love with people’s faces and felt this really profound sense of connection with these people who were hurting and lost, and felt lucky to spend time with them, hearing their stories and taking their pictures. It was heart-breaking, and profound and made me grateful. Not grateful that I had it so much better than them, though there was that, but grateful that they were beautiful and real and had amazing stories and I was lucky enough to spend time with them and they would share with me. Very few people asked for money or anything from me, but were giving and open and touched that someone cared enough to even want to spend time with them.
It was a brutal environment. Even though I had spent years as a cop dealing with people at their worst, I had never seen what I saw in the Tenderloin and the Mission where I lived. People laying in the street, openly using needles amongst three or four people at a time, human feces and urine everywhere, a huge gaping wound in the middle of this city, and all of these people just barely hanging on for dear life. Something about this place made me feel as though I was in the right place at the right time. After that, I took my camera everywhere with me and ended up shooting over three thousand street portraits and recording stories all over the northern hemisphere.
I still want to spend every free waking moment either on the street shooting life or my studios, working out creative photographic projects in my studio.
With the writing, it’s a longer story. When I was six, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I recognized I had a prolific imagination, a love of words and books, and I felt like I needed to express myself. I wrote through grade school, high school, college and won a national undergraduate writing award. After that, I worked on a novel while spending two years in a Monastery in central Minnesota. Then, I went home to Milwaukee, started taking credits in Social Work at University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin, and worked with kids with a history of violent crimes, emotional disturbance and gang affiliations. In the meantime, I got married, had two kids, no time for writing, and then I became a cop. During my divorce, while my kids were very young, any time I had by myself during the week when I couldn’t see my kids I ended up writing two manuscripts that I shopped around and they ended up living in shoeboxes in my closet, and I began to write little stories to go along with my photography and reflections on life as a guy who’s been through a lot and is in his sixties.
I spend more time on my writing now than I do on my photography, but that’s not planned or part of the program, it’s like everything that I’ve done, by the seat of my pants.