In The News

Bette Garber, trucking photographer, dies

Bette S. Garber, well-known trucking photographer and longtime contributor to Newport Communications publications, died unexpectedly Thursday following an extended illness.


Garber was a well-known presence on the custom truck beauty competition circuit. Her first published photo, of trucks blockading Interstate 70 at the port of entry on the Kansas-Missouri state line, appeared in a trucking magazine in 1977.


On her stock photography web site, Highway Images, she wrote, "Something about the big metal machines grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let go. The fiercely independent souls who choose to drive the big rigs captured my heart ... I see trucks as objects of beauty, power and majesty."


Garber published a number of lavishly illustrated books on custom trucks, including her most recent, "Ultra-Custom Semi Trucks" published earlier this year.


"She was kind of like the Annie Liebovitz of trucking," says Deborah Lockridge, senior managing editor of Newport Communications, who first worked with Bette in 1990. (Liebovitz is the famous American photographer known for her unusual portrait photography of celebrities in such publications as Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.)