"I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."
- e. e. cummings
Scott discovered the magic of photography when he developed his first print in a darkroom under some stairs of an elementary school. He was in sixth grade.
Many years would pass before a youngster’s awe would become a young adult’s serious quest to try to master an art that, said the great photographer and curator Edward Steichen, “is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both incredibly easy and impossibly difficult.”
Scott’s quest took twists and turns that led him through Northwestern University, where he earned a bachelor’s in English, while he also spent long hours practicing the skills of photography and studying painting, drawing and art history. He eventually began a career as a newspaper journalist and spent more than 30 years total at the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. He was a caption writer, an assistant photo editor and a contributor to both papers as a photographer and writer. He edited local, foreign and national news. He also freelanced as a commercial and journalistic photographer, shooting products, annual reports, executive portraits, weddings, magazine stories and some sports. Scott has become the official photographer of the Chicago Shoreline Marathon (www.chicagoshorelinemarathon.com), a world-class 25-mile kayak race along Chicago’s lakefront. His work has been exhibited in many group and solo exhibits and is in many private collections.
Scott recently left the newspaper world to pursue his passion full time.
“I always wanted to be the Beethoven of photography,” Scott told an interviewer recently. “But in music, you take a single idea and expound on it. The genius of photography is taking a large idea and capturing it in that instant when all the elements of time, light and composition magically fall together.” He admits that this can be “impossibly difficult.”
For Scott, photography in a sense adheres to Francis Bacon’s maxim, “The contemplation of things as they are without error without confusion without substitution or imposture is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of inventions.” That is why Scott loves both nature and the street.
“That’s where life is,” Scott told the interviewer. “If I am seeing clearly as I shoot, my photographs are full of sensuality in their texture, color, tone and content ... I want people to feel the pictures, to see the world.”
Scott lives in Chicago, the city of his birth.