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Unique Focus: Kalo Shares Montages Of Scott Mutter’s Photo Legacy


Bob Mutter (right) talks to exhibit visitors.

When they were growing up in Park Ridge, Bob Mutter doesn’t remember his brother Scott picking up a camera once.

Yet, by the time Scott Mutter died in 2008 at the age of 64, he had established himself as the creator of fascinating and clever photo montages which he called “Surrational Images.”

Many of those images are on display through the end of January at the Kalo Foundation’s Iannelli Studios Heritage Center, 255 N. Northwest Highway, Park Ridge. The studio is open on Saturdays, starting at 10 a.m. or by appointment.

Bob Mutter reminisced Jan. 7 at the exhibit opening. Scott graduated from Maine East High School in 1961 and headed to University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

His freshman year wasn’t focused on a particular major, and Bob said that had he not joined a fraternity where the older members prodded the pledges to study and succeed, he might not have lasted.

Instead, he began to get interested in art and majored in Chinese studies. He took a photography class to learn the mechanics of cameras, adjusting F-stops and using a darkroom, although his professors didn’t understand why he wasn’t as interested in some of the aspects of composition.

Scott Mutter featured his brother in this architectural alcove.

Scott was teaching himself, however, and he used classic film cameras and darkroom techniques to start layering images with his imagination adding details to make interesting statements.

He stayed in Urbana for a while, exploring counter cultures and eventually coming back to Park Ridge.

In one of the obituaries written at the university in 2008, Sam Fein wrote that Scott credited Fein’s father for inspiring the vision to take “pictures of history.”

Bob still isn’t sure how the Chinese studies fit into the art Scott would eventually produce.

One part of the parquet floor at the Krannert Arts Center at the university became the floor of a forest.

The university library’s card catalogue cases became the basement stacks below Chicago’s old main library, now the Cultural Arts Center.

Sculptor Lorado Taft, who had split his time between Urbana and studios in Hyde Park, must have interested Scott. Taft’s huge sculpture of Father Time at the west end of University of Chicago’s Midway Plaisance, and the Fountain of the Great Lakes outside the Art Institute were featured in montages.

(Leonard Crunelle of Edison Park, considered an early member of the Park Ridge artists’ colony, worked on both of these projects with Taft).

Borrowed bits of Rockefeller Chapel were detailed in all sorts of creations.

Bob says he was never allowed in the darkroom, but Scott often recruited him to help carry equipment on photo shoots.

A chandelier descends from the sky.

In one image, Bob’s round forehead became an archway, with two smaller alcoves appearing as sunglasses peering into a church. Trains and commuters appeared frequently. Sports were also frequently added. There might be a football game in the center of a busy intersection.

When Wrigley Field was being considered for its first night baseball games, the field was pictured with flashlights shining across the dark field in “Fans Shed Light on the Game.”

His fans continue to take a second look at a Mutter montage. For the visit of King Tut to the Field Museum, the Pharoah’s iconic casket image was perched on a Chicago skyscraper. The Marshall Field store at Water Tower Place had a pair of up and down escalators. Scott added an ocean at the bottom, with a shopper hiking across the waves.

Nearly all the Mutter collection is in black and white.

One of only a handful of color images, a Chicago Bulls tribute with horns above a snout made of the basketball net, is in the exhibit. Bob said Scott had challenges to get the net positioned the way he wanted, and finally they starched it.

Many photographers of that era worked in black and white images, finding the precise control that color film did not allow. Scott Mutter experimented in his darkroom to get exactly what satisfied him.

Scott Mutter

He did not find the same comfort level in color, and even less in computers or digital images. Designers using Photoshop were trying to take shortcuts and copy his work without considering the art or the message. Eventually, he stopped taking photographs and became more concerned with protecting his copyrighted images.

His work continues to intrigue and inspire, with calendars and a book about his art still in print 10 years after his death.

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