Archives West Finding Aid

Writer-Photographer John Suiter was born and spent his early years in the Philadelphia area. He attended Syracuse University from 1965-1968. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he traveled around the United States, writing freelance articles for underground newspapers such as the Berkeley Barb, the Madison Kaleidoscope, the Syracuse Nickel Review, and The Black Panther. He eventually earned a B.A. in American Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse University in 1973. For several years in the mid-1970s and early 80s he worked as a bookseller.

In the mid-1980s, Suiter attended the Art Institute of Boston and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied to become a photographer. He began doing free-lance assignment photography work for magazines in the Boston area in 1988. In 1989 he published his first photo-essay entitled, “Kerouac’s Lowell”—a ten-image exploration of the literary landscape of Lowell, Massachusetts, hometown of beat writer Jack Kerouac. This photo-essay, published in Bostonia magazine, earned him a culture grant from the Department of the Interior to create an exhibit of Kerouac-related images for Lowell’s Preservation Commission. “Rumours of Kerouac”, opened at the James McNeil Whistler House in Lowell and the Boott Gallery at the Lowell National Historical Park in 1993.

In 1994 and ’95, Suiter traveled to Mexico, following the route described by Jack Kerouac in On the Road and Visions of Cody. Photographs from these trips were included in the 1994 group exhibit “Beat Art: Visual Works by and about the Beat Generation” at New York University, and in the award-winning A Jack Kerouac CD-ROMnibus, an early digital multi-media project. Suiter was Associate Producer on that production.

Also in 1995, Suiter added to his Kerouac-related portfolio with pictures from Desolation Lookout in Washington state—the fire-watch cabin that provides the setting for the culminating chapters of Kerouac’s novel, The Dharma Bums. Suiter stayed at Desolation Lookout as a volunteer fire-watcher in the summer of 1995. The photographs he made during that time were later exhibited at the Visitors’ Center of the North Cascades National Park in Newhalem, Washington, and, in subsequent years, at numerous other galleries.

With his experience at Desolation Lookout, Suiter began the transition from being strictly a photographer to a photographer-writer. His first published writing (since 1970) was a 1996 article about Kerouac’s sojourn on Desolation Peak for The Independent in London. In 1997 and ’98 Suiter returned to the North Cacades, expanding his Kerouac project to include Kerouac’s fellow poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. [It was Snyder who encouraged Kerouac to apply for a fire lookout job in 1956 and was the life model for Kerouac’s character “Japhy Ryder” in The Dharma Bums]. In 1997, Suiter met and interviewed Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. After a series of photo-essays, interviews, and correspondence with them, and other San Francisco poets, Suiter published Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. [Counterpoint Press, 2002]. This book led in turn to Counterpoint contracting Suiter to write the first full-length biography of Gary Snyder, a long-term project on which Suiter is still at work at this writing (2014).

From 1997 to 2006 he taught documentary photography and digital imaging at the New England School of Photography and the Art Institute of Boston. In 2006, Suiter was invited to Logan to present at Utah State University’s Tanner Symposium, “The 1950s, the Beat Generation, and the Power of Expression.” In 2007, the university began acquiring Suiter’s photographs and research materials. Suiter’s photographic prints and negatives from that project are in the John Suiter Photograph Collection: USU_P0375.