Scott F Lanes
The only thing Scott Lanes has ever wanted to do was to make pictures.
His parents gave him his first camera, a Polaroid Land Camera, when he was 12 and he was hooked. In the early 1980s he earned his living as a freelance photographer for newspapers in Boston covering everything from county fairs to polo matches to the Boston music scene. Although newspaper work was paying the bills and there were plenty of assignments he decided that photojournalism was not providing him with creative freedom that he
needed.
Scott looked at other career opportunities and 1987 he took a job as an assistant in a commercial photography studio.
Studio photography required much more discipline and attention to detail than newspaper work, but it allowed him to have much more control of the finished photograph. It became clear that this direction was going to be much more fulfilling. In 1998 he took what he had learned about lighting and went to work for a Boston corporate photographer as First Assistant and spent 2 years travelling the world taking pictures for annual reports and corporate brochures. These 2 years were a crash course in photographing people, shooting portraits in the studio and on location.
Scott had always been drawn to the magnificent lighting and styling of the Hollywood and fashion photographers of the 1930s and 40s. He set out to develop his own style based on the spectacular work by masters such as C. Bull, Horst P. Horst and Yousuf Karsh.
Scott's other significant influence during these formative years was the composition and mood of Film Noir. The use of light, shadow, composition, emotion and atmosphere that was such a big part of Film Noir greatly complemented his new style.
Although he began shooting portraits with this concept in 1989, it wasn't until he started working with the woman that he would later marry, his wife Laura, that his vision materialized. Scott photographed Laura playing tenor sax in the industrial band Sleep Chamber at the infamous (and now defunct) Rathskeller in Boston in 1990. He used the prints from the show as an introduction and they began working together a short time later.
Laura is a professional makeup artist and stylist who added the finishing touch to Scott's work. Laura spent a lot of time developing her own style that worked well with the harsh lighting and shadows of Scott's work. Scott's current portfolio is a close working collaboration between he and Laura.
Scott's work is regularly shown in galleries and has been widely published in books and magazines around the world.
