FORTINO, SCOTT

Walter Peyton College Prep, Corridor, 2002
C-print
10 x 10 inches on 11 x 14 inch paper
Signed Edition of 50

(United States, b. 1952)

Scott Fortino photographs Chicago public school classrooms - highly structured environments normally filled to capacity that in Fortino's work resonate through the absence of human presence. By selecting scenes in which rectilinear fields of color and line flatten out space, Fortino confines our attention to the interior details that the rooms' designers have planned and the occupants have left behind. Brightly colored walls, for example, evidence attempts to reverse the deadening and leveling effects of the bland institutional environments. Fortino holds a BA from Columbia College Chicago (1980) and an MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2001). He lives and works in Chicago, where he has been a police officer for more than twenty-three years.