Sarah Stacke

Kenneth T. Mars, Jr. (1940–2011) walked the roads of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, nearly every day, in every season, in every type of weather, for four decades. He walked to make pictures.

Between the late 1960s and the early 2000s, Mars, a tall and slender man who favored a trench coat, likely made 80,000 photos of trees and tree-lined roads. Of houses and historical buildings. Parades, parking lots, beachgoers, and baptisms. Dogs and chickens. His church. A station wagon passing by.

“After the film was developed, Mars methodically organized the prints, with the help of his dad, in dime-store albums.”

He used a simple point and click camera, presumably several different models over the years. There’s no evidence he sought to upgrade his equipment; he just needed a camera that worked. After the film was developed, Mars methodically organized the prints, with the help of his dad, in dime-store albums—heaps of them in all sizes, shapes, and colors. He stored the albums in the basement of the home he shared with his parents, on wooden shelves in his bedroom, and in boxes under his bed.

What isn’t known is—why? Why did Mars make the photographs?

He was a familiar presence to the people of South Kingstown. And yet, the prevailing opinion, says Erica Luke, the executive director of the local South County History Center, is that, outside of his family, “no one really knew” this man, who was at once amiable, laconic, inquisitive, and private.

Born in South Kingstown on March 29, 1940, Mars was the only child of Lucille Mars (née Greenwood) and Rev. Kenneth T. Mars, Sr. The family were members of the Narragansett Tribe. When Mars was 22 years old, he began working with the custodial staff at the University of Rhode Island (URI) Memorial Student Union. Forty years later, in 2002, he retired. A handful of pages in his photo albums show colleagues, their smiles and 80s-era hairstyles arrested by the camera’s flash. Mars is pictured too. He stands next to a co-worker, with his hands in the pockets of his blue work pants and alongside a man in a Rhode Island sweatshirt who playfully gives him bunny ears.

On weekends and for special gatherings, Mars served as an usher at the Peace Dale First Church of God. His father and other relatives helped build the church in the 1940s. “The Mars family were largely carpenters by trade,” says Silvermoon Mars LaRose, assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum, Rhode Island’s only museum entirely dedicated to telling the story of the Indigenous people of southern New England. Kenneth Mars, Sr. became the pastor of Peace Dale in the 1960s, and he and Lucille led the church for 30 years.

When Mars wasn’t at church or working at URI, he walked (he was never interested in riding a bike or driving a car) and photographed the seemingly quotidian terrain of his hometown, or diligently studied old issues of the Narragansett Times in the Rhode Island History room at the Peace Dale Library.

In 2011, at age 71, Mars died of undiagnosed Lyme disease. Following his death, an estimated two-thirds of the photo albums, plus the reams of notes he jotted at the library, were lost. In 2018, the remaining albums were donated to the South County History Center.

The Kenneth T. Mars, Jr. Photograph Collection totals 27, 432 images. The center’s staff doggedly digitized every print and album page, keeping Mars’s arrangement intact. Luke is sure the constitution of the albums is purposeful. “I just can’t quite put my finger on all the connections,” she says. In several instances, Mars photographed a nondescript house and then went to the cemetery and photographed the headstone of the former owner. “You’d have to do the research or read local history to know there’s a linkage there,” Luke explains.

The collection is, above all, marked by visual repetition. In album after album, thousands of nearly identical photographs appear side by side. “It’s like Google Maps before Google Maps,” says Luke, referring to the series that show Mars’s step-by-step progress along rural and city streets. The albums also illustrate the photographer’s pattern of revisiting specific scenes—days, months, and years apart. “He returned to the same trees over and over,” remarks Luke, “and the same buildings, the same houses.”

“Both LaRose and Luke feel the trees are a key to understanding the photographs.”

Both LaRose and Luke feel the trees are a key to understanding the photographs. “He had a particular affinity for trees,” says LaRose. “Documenting their growth and seasonal cycles. That brought him joy.”

Whatever Mars’s intentions or motivations might have been, he built a cohesive and detailed body of work that creates an intimate portrait of South Kingstown and the ways it changed, from season to season, throughout his life. Day after day, Mars photographed subtle glimpses of the town’s people and landscape that might otherwise have stayed unseen.

A neighbor feeding a squirrel on her porch. Stone walls, telephone poles, and trees sprouting pink blossoms. A hazy blue car in the shadow of a sunny white church. Fading signs on stores, soon to be replaced. A gang of four kids racing down the street on their bikes.

“There’s so many stories in his photos,” marvels LaRose.

Nothing was too commonplace for Mars to treasure with a photograph. He was, it seems, gratified by it all—the research, the process of making photographs, the arrangement of the albums, and what it revealed to him about his environment and his place in it. “He had a gentle spirit,” says LaRose. “He leaves a legacy for other individuals to see that you can do something you love, that satisfies your heard, and that is worthwhile.”

At the same time, she recognizes “how very valuable” his photographic archive is. “The fact that he was a Narragansett tribal member make me feel just a little more proud for my community,” says LaRose, “and the many unsung contributions they make to our state.”

—Sarah Stacke, 2025