Click this link to go to a list of most of the musicians that Chester has photographed.
Chester Simpson grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, a town set in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains, before hitchhiking across the country in 1975 to accept a scholarship at the San Francisco Institute of Art to study photography. In San Francisco, he met two of the major influences on his life, legendary master photographer Ansel Adams, founder of the Institute's photography department, and Jim Marshall, the famous rock-n-roll photographer. While attending school, he assisted photographers to learn the business side of photography and started hanging out and taking photographs in punk rock clubs at night.
Rolling Stone magazine published his first picture while he was still in Art School, which kicked off his career as a rock-n-roll photographer shooting for MTV and Warner Bros, MCA, AM, Capitol, CBS, and Chrysalis Records He also shot for magazines like Rolling Stone, BAM, New Musical Express, Melody Maker, People, Newsweek, Creem, Berkeley Barb, Circus, California, New West, New York Rocker, and San Francisco.
After ten years and several record covers to his credit he moved to Alexandria, Virginia and accepted a photography staff position from the local daily newspaper, the Alexandria Gazette. In 1989 he took a position as Director of Photography at the Pentagon newspaper, the Pentagram, and started freelancing as a tour photographer traveling with music artists all over the world to entertain our troops on USO Tours.
Documenting thirty-two USO tours with performers and celebrities such as La Toya Jackson, Billy Joel, Jay Leno, Sheryl Crow, Sinbad, Hilary & Chelsea Clinton, Hootie & the Blowfish, Gin Blossoms, B.B. King, Paula Cole, 10,000 Maniacs, Blues Traveler, Claudia Church, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts among many others, he visited U.S. bases in Bosnia, Macedonia, Haiti, Panama, Honduras, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Dubi, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sicily, Azores, Germany, Netherlands, England, France, Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland, Puerto Rico, Cuba, St. Thomas, Bermuda, Antigua, Croatia, Japan, Okinawa, and Korea.
During 2000 he became the Photo Editor/Photographer for the Stars and Stripes Newspaper in the USA until it folded in 2001. Chester now works on personal projects and freelances for corporations, organizations, associations, and publications in and around the Washington, DC/Baltimore area. He was at the Pentagon on Sept. 11th taking digital pictures fifteen minutes after the jet hit the building and transmitted them to SIPA Photo agency in Paris, France an hour later. Simpson owns the copyright to all of his images, and exhibits in local galleries in the Washington, DC area.