Scott M. Fincher
Portfolio
Biography
In short, one can say no more than one can see.
Early in my career, I used to fantasize that I could be a Beethoven of photography. The idea contradicts the central principle of the medium. What distinguishes photography from the other arts is time. Unlike music, which takes a single idea and expands it, photography interrupts the continuum and digests it into an exquisite moment where understanding, composition and action intersect.
All this is expressed succinctly in poet e.e. cummings's introduction to his volume "Is Five":
"I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement."
In my eyes, photography also adheres to Francis Bacon's maxim, "The contemplation of things as they are without error, without confusion, without substitution or imposture is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of inventions." That is why I love both nature and the street and quest for the image that sits on the cusp of the real and surreal.
For the most part, I do not manipulate the images in the digital "darkroom" any more than I would have were I using techniques of the old "wet" darkrooms. Mostly, I adjust luminosity. My background is print journalism. I edited photography and foreign and national news for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times for many years before deciding to rededicate myself to my passion. It has been, as the great Edward Steichen once said about the photographic act, "Incredibly easy and impossibly difficult."
Nevertheless, the results have been good, and I have won national, international and art fair awards since my return to photography in 2006. My images are in collections all over the U.S. and in Germany, Poland, Denmark and Venezuela.
I hold a bachelor's in English from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and have studied photography in too many workshops to enumerate. I live in Chicago.
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United Kingdom (b. 1982)
Rory Lewis is a British portrait photographer whose work carries the language of the Old Masters into the present day. A historian before he was a photographer — he read Medieval History at King's College London — Lewis came to the camera through painting: Holbein's court portraits, Caravaggio's tenebrism, Rembrandt's candour. Twenty-three years on, that education still governs the work, which he describes simply as capturing history, one portrait at a time.
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Republic of Uzbekistan
Born in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, Behzod Boltaev is a visual artist and street photographer whose work explores human presence, architectural geometry, and the dramatic interplay of light and shadow. His photographic practice was shaped in part by his family heritage, as he learned the fundamentals of visual language from his father. Through his images, he brings together observation, composition, and atmosphere to reveal poetic connections between people and the spaces they inhabit.
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Italy
John Gubertini is an Italian photographer and visual storyteller based in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With more than forty years behind the camera, his work is rooted in observation rather than spectacle, seeking the quiet emotional truths hidden within everyday life. His photography has a strong connection with black-and-white imagery, where light, shadow, and silence become essential elements of the narrative. His photographs often explore themes of memory, identity, vulnerability, and the invisible dialogue between people and their environment.
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United States (b. 1955)
I was 8 years old in Lincoln, Nebraska, when my dad gave me my first camera. I cherished it. I also loved our family tape recorder—a novelty in 1963—and a listening device with a parabolic dish called “The Big Ear.” These things, plus a chromed Raleigh bike, were prized possessions. I had mobility and means to record sights and sounds. After many years in the midwest—running a business and raising a family—I moved to Sedona, Arizona.
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United States (b. 1944)
Though photography was not Jim Lustenader’s profession, it became his calling decades ago, thanks to Life magazine, the Kodak Brownie and an enduring wanderlust. When he moved to New York City in 1970 to work in advertising, Lustenader discovered the excitement and challenges of street photography — its combination of photojournalism, documentary and pure surprise that invites the viewer to share unguarded slices of time.
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United States (b. 1978)
My work explores the relationship between place, time, and memory, revealing the narratives that exist within both natural landscapes and human environments. It moves between quiet observation and more untamed experiences, but at its core, it is about connection to place and the way experience shapes how an image is seen and understood. I’m drawn to places where natural systems and human presence intersect.
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