Michael Weinstein

Scott Fortino is a cop with a soul. Yes, such an animal exists and Fortino's color photographs prove it. Deeply sensitive to and troubled by the psychological costs of the disciplinary institution for which he works, Fortino presents starkly clinical and grim views of the spaces of incarceration that he runs across in his everyday work routine. His unsparing shots take us inside holding cells waiting silently for their next unfortunate occupant, revealing that these places are cold, sterile, shabby and unforgiving, offering no hooks on which to hang any human emotion. They are interchangeable, except for stray graffiti and wear and tear, with all of the other drab spaces where we wait abjectly for someone else to determine our fate. Fortino's companion shots of empty school corridors and classrooms show that they are also prisons.

Scott Fortino is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan, (312)663-5554, through December 20.

(2002-11-20)

Also by Michael Weinstein

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One of the stars of England's contemporary art world, Gillian Wearing shows what happens when postmodern playfulness and social criticism blend with traditional photographic genres like street photography and portraiture in our incoherent cultural environment.
(2002-11-13)

Tip of the Week
Although she is a photographic globetrotter, Susan McMillen is not motivated by exotic voyeurism, but by the intent to reveal the continuities of human life that pulse beneath the variegated skins of cultural forms
(2002-11-06)

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In a tour de force, Joan Truckenbrod has created a photo and video installation that combines a meditation on life and death with searing social criticism.
(2002-10-30)

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Sally Mann has always been a dreamer. The provocative photographs of her children that made her famous were self-declared fantasies, rather than windows on their world, as many people perversely believed.
(2002-10-23)

Tip of the Week
(2002-10-02)

Tip of the Week
(2002-08-14)

TIP OF THE WEEK
(2002-08-07)

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