Chicago, 1999
A Chicago police officer since 1980, Scott Fortino used to think of his job and his artwork as diametrically opposed. After returning to graduate school for photography in 1998, however, he realized that his uniform facilitated access to restricted places rich in photographic potential. In addition, while on duty, he found that he could not arrest his visual curiosity, continually discovering places to revisit with his camera.
In his photographs of institutional spaces, Fortino explores the psychology of confinement and protection. Observed with an almost clinical formality, his pictures of Chicago public school classrooms and police station holding cells, both highly structured and regimented environments normally filled to capacity, resonate through the absence of a human presence.
Fortino works with methodical precision. By selecting scenes in which fields of color and line flatten out space, Fortino confines our attention to the interior details that the rooms’ occupants have left behind. Brightly colored walls and graffiti evidence attempts to reverse the deadening and leveling affects of bland institutional environments, as well as the very human need to assert independence and individuality in the face of restriction and impersonality. The Museum of Contemporary Photography organized his first museum exhibition in 2002. A Chicago native, Fortino has recently been photographing the shores of Lake Michigan.
Scott Fortino has a BA from Columbia College Chicago (1980) and an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2000). His works have been exhibited at Gallery 312 and Gallery 400, Chicago, as well as at the Chicago Park Hyatt Hotel. In addition, his works are held in the collection of the LaSalle Bank, Chicago. Fortino has taught at Columbia College Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago; he is currently a Chicago police officer.