Books:
Grandpa Danny
Hardcover: 112 pages
Publisher: Dark Lark Press; 1st edition
Date: December 3, 2008
ISBN-10: 0615205968
ISBN-13: 978-0615205960
Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.8 x 0.6 inches
An excerpt from: The Afterword of Grandpa Danny
"This is the real intimacy of these photographs — those marks of self-consciousness that would seem to indicate a barrier to intimacy, intimate because those marks of hesitancy, questioning, and uncertainty are real, and Danny allows them. This is the gift Danny has given Chester — to allow Chester to keep photographing when he doesn't know exactly what Chester is looking for, to be vulnerable in the photographic process, to contribute to that process in which he becomes vulnerable."
Robert Kotchen, 2008
The Globe
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Dark Lark Press, L.L.C.; 1st edition
Date: May 15, 2010
ISBN-10: 0615339417
ISBN-13: 978-0615339412
Product Dimensions: 11.2 x 8.6 x 0.9 inches
A collection of collages, drawings and photographs made in a Chicago football (soccer) pub with essays by Jamie Michael Bradley, Sandra Kaminska Costello, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, John Goodwin and Jamie Hale.
An excerpt from: An Essay Entitled, “The Globe is (not) an Oasis.” Or, “A People’s History of (American Soccer in) the United States.”
"Which is why it would have been too reductive and predictably trite if I were to have begun this essay with a sentence like this: “The Globe is an oasis”—or anything bullshit like that. The Globe is a pub, period. Okay; insert intensifier: The Globe is a football pub. Yes, obviously. But the Globe, for so many of us, is more akin to a dwelling of sorts, one which each of us defines and details and delimits according to the weight we carry. Some of us will never dwell in the grounds we loved because the grounds are gone, as is the case for my fellow Whiskey Brother, Tom Dunmore. The Goldstone Ground, where his dad first took him to see Brighton and Hove Albion play, was torn down in 1997. The Globe allows ex-pats, like Tommy, to move as close together as possible in order to allow the scenes that fill their memories to be spoken of and to accumulate, like so many thousands of threads in a fabric, like the weight of so many gaps in so many personal histories. The Globe also allows those of us who will never stand on such terraces to learn about those places and those people from those who knew them truly.
If this true, then a dwelling is a space that we carve with the power of our lungs, not just our hands or our minds. Oxygen fuels more than fire - it propels our stories. Our screams (whatever other emotional purpose they may serve), like our scarves, are nailed firmly into the walls of The Globe. Just like our bar tabs and our livers, our anguish and our elation, our conversations and our stories – all of them – they are all manifested vocalizations of the pure space that The Globe occupies for so many of us.
Chester’s photographs are the visual document of our vocalizations; our vocalizations caught in mid-flight."
Aaron Patrick Flanagan, 2010
Somewhere In-Between Chicago
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Artist’s edition in edition of 50 copies
Date: May 20, 2018
ISBN-13: 978-0-692-96464-4
Product Dimensions: 8.75 x 8.75 x 1.5 inches
This collection gathers work produced as part of the Chicago Portraits, Chicago Street Notes, Listen and the aforementioned projects into book form with essays by Max King Cap, Juan Angel Chavez, Anya Davidson and Paul Melvin Hopkin.
From the introduction of “Somewhere In-Between Chicago”.
In 1993 Chester Alamo-Costello moved to Chicago from Indianapolis with a couple Kentuckians, Jesse Bercowetz and LaDonna Wilson. Somewhere In-Between Chicago is a collection of portraits of artists, musicians, and the casual passerby contrasted with imagery of the city produced between his arrival and 2018. At core a portrait book, Somewhere In-Between Chicago examines the various creative communities that inhabit this city that is always self-inventing, always somewhere in-between, and why he decided to stay.