Fred Scruton
(b. 1956)
Fred Scruton is a professional photographer who travels extensively throughout the United States to photograph, video record, and write about artists working outside of the mainstream of contemporary art. He currently teaches photography at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
Scruton’s work has been featured in a multitude of publications and galleries, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, John Weber Gallery, and the Sonnabend Gallery.
When reflecting on a primary source of inspiration, Scruton stated:
“While working as a freelance photographer of artwork and architecture in New York City during the art boom of the 1980’s, I would drive home, from Manhattan, along Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn; Twenty-third Street was the turn-off street to my apartment, and in the mid-80’s, hand-painted religious signs began to decorate a corner building at that intersection. Later, chalk rantings were scrawled on the walls and the narrow fenced-off area in front began to display assemblages of objects and signs: including smashed TV sets, an earth globe, a sewing machine, a decorative dove perched on a working lamp, and Louis DiBaggio’s family pictures. He [Louis] lived alone in the four-story brick building and would write religious sentiments on paper cut-outs and index cards that could be seen sprinkled throughout his changing displays or pinned to the white dress shirt he wore in public. The emotional outpourings of Louis’ ‘installations’ contrasted powerfully with the contemporary art I was photographing professionally, and despite occasional harangues, I repeatedly photographed his work in black and white using a large 8×10 inch film camera. ‘Outsider’ art was mostly unfamiliar to me, but as my interest grew, Louis’ corner would come to mark a turning-point in my life as well. After he was apparently institutionalized and the building went up for sale, I was forced to look elsewhere for this unexpected, but now primary subject of my personal photography.” [1]
Scruton later went on to add, “I found Louis's work to have an emotional bite that was impossible to overlook. His moods were unpredictable, but I was able to photograph quite a bit of his work.” [2]
While traveling across the country to meet with artists and visit their sites, Scruton takes his time in getting to know the artists as he creates a plan, sets up his equipment to photograph and film their art, and waits for the ideal lighting conditions. His patience and skill have resulted in some of the most striking photos of art environments the genre has seen. When precisely cropping his images, Scruton has the power to intensify the inherent emotions of an image, shifting them toward the serious or comic at will – even in the cases where the original image might have had a different intent. For Scruton, cropping is a prime expressive device. Through numerous visits through the years, Scruton has built priceless evolutionary visual timelines of creators and their art – as well as lifelong friendships. [3]
The extensive career in photography has brought Scruton to a wide variety of people, “with vastly different life circumstances and experiences, with art-making as seemingly their only commonality. The collaborative process of photographing, videotaping, writing about, and getting to know these artists and their work has enriched and broadened my own life immeasurably.” [4] Among the artists he has photographed are Prophet Isaiah Robertson’s house in Niagara Falls, NY; Billy Tripp’s Mindfield Cemetery in Brownsville, TN; and Joe Minter’s African Village in America in Birmingham, AL.
Fred Scruton also creates work based on his interest in “‘vernacular’ architecture in the City of Buffalo and as a part of an ongoing documentary project about the conversion of (often marginal) urban structures into religious buildings.”
For more information on Fred Scruton, visit his website.
[1] https://fredscruton.com/about/
[2] http://www.spacesarchives.org/resources/blog/fred-scruton/
[3] http://www.spacesarchives.org/resources/blog/fred-scruton/