Terrell Lester

Terrell S. Lester was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1948 and moved with his family to Orlando, Florida, as a child. His early years were spent exploring the lakes, springs, beaches, and undeveloped landscapes of central Florida, an experience that later became central to his photographic work. Before becoming a full-time artist, Lester worked in environmental engineering and land surveying, eventually serving as head of technical support services for an environmental engineering firm. Seeing firsthand how quickly development was changing the Florida landscape pushed him toward photography as a way to preserve places that were disappearing. In the early 1980s, he taught himself photography, built a darkroom, and began printing and exhibiting images of the Florida wilderness.

In 1985, Lester left his engineering career and moved to Rochester, New York, to pursue fine art landscape photography full time. For the next decade, he traveled extensively along the East Coast, following the seasons and exhibiting at more than forty outdoor art shows each year. During a photographic trip to Maine in the late 1980s, he discovered Deer Isle and soon made the Downeast region his home. Maine became the defining subject of his career, with Lester photographing its coastlines, islands, fishing communities, rural architecture, harbors, and changing seasons in a body of work that earned him national recognition.

That work culminated in the 2001 book Maine: The Seasons, published by Knopf/Random House. The volume brought together more than one hundred of Lester’s photographs with essays by Elizabeth Strout, Ann Beattie, Richard Russo, and Richard Ford, and became one of the best-known publications devoted to his Maine imagery. The following year, Lester appeared on Charlie Rose to discuss the book and the unusual path that led him from environmental work to photography.

Lester’s photographs have been widely exhibited and collected, with work represented in galleries and included in museum, corporate, and private collections internationally. In later years, his subject matter expanded beyond Maine to include the Rocky Mountains, the broader American West, and the people and culture of central Mexico. Across decades of work, his photography has remained grounded in close observation of landscape, season, weather, and human presence, creating images that function both as fine art and as a record of places undergoing continual change. ×