Jenner School, Alphabet

About the Photographer

Fortino, Scott

American, b. 1952

A Chicago police officer for twenty-three years, Scott Fortino once thought 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 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 human presence. Fortino works with methodical precision. By selecting scenes in which fields of color and line flatten out space, he 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 the bland institutional environments, as well as the very human need to assert independence and individuality in the face of restriction and impersonality.

In his most recent body of work, Between utility and desire (2014-present), Scott Fortino photographs the surface of windows in downtown Chicago buildings. His images both peer into the interiors of iconic architecture, such as structures designed by Mies van der Rohe, while also reflecting the outside environment, thereby merging, in camera, the vivid patterns and colors of two divided spaces. The downtown post office is transformed into intertwining patterns of metal and glass. In other images, colorful plant life blends with blinds and metal girders, creating triangular shapes that evoke Institute of Design era photographs by artists including Ray Metzker, Richard Nikel, and Ken Josephson. Fortino’s photographs meld industrial steel and plate glass—the materials that comprise the majority of skyscrapers built in the city since the 1950s— with reflections of the street, creating an alternate look at Chicago’s architectural landmarks at ground level.

Scott Fortino has a BA from Columbia College Chicago (1980) and an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2001).