Scott Mutter, 1944-2008

Work included Wrigley Field lighted by fans, a forest with parquet floor
By Trevor Jensen
Tribune reporter
March 13, 2008

Scott Mutter fit photographs together to produce montages that held fast in people's minds.

Mr. Mutter's photography sold as original artwork and in calendars and posters. Perhaps best known, particularly to habitues of North Side bars, was his poster "Fans Shed Light on the Game," which showed Wrigley Field lighted for a night game by fans with flashlights.

Mr. Mutter, 64, was found dead Saturday, March 8, in his Park Ridge home, said his brother, Robert. His death was ruled a suicide by the Cook County medical examiner's office.

Mr. Mutter grew up in various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs, graduating from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, his brother said. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a college freshman in 1961 and wound up staying Downstate until 1985.

During that time he picked up a couple of degrees from the U. of I., including a master's in Chinese studies, his brother said. He grew his hair long, participated in anti-war protests and was on hand for the demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.

In Champaign he ran an antiques shop for a time and for several years rented halls to show classic and foreign movies, a business done in by the advent of home video players.

Influenced by the montage methods of Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Mr. Mutter began experimenting in the dark room with negatives of different photographs.

By the early 1980s, when he moved back to Park Ridge, he had established himself as a maker of eye-catching and startling images. Among his pieces were a forest with a parquet floor, a chandelier hanging from a cloud and a football team breaking into a play in a busy Chicago intersection.

A deeply thoughtful man, Mr. Mutter hoped that his work "spoke for mankind," said Patrick Groehler, his licensing agent.

"There was a much deeper side to what he did," Groehler said.

A print that showed Michigan Avenue high-rises undergirded by library card catalogs, for example, was intended to illustrate that education is the foundation of all things, said Robert Hiebert, owner of Printworks Gallery in River North, which showed Mr. Mutter's work.

"I think of him as more of an artist than a photographer," Hiebert said.

Some of his work was strictly commercial. He made his Wrigley Field poster during the controversy over lighting the ballpark in the 1980s.

In 1992, Mr. Mutter published a collection of his work in "Surrational Images." In galleries, his displays were automatic conversation starters and sold well at Printworks, Hiebert said.

"People would walk by the photos, they'd stare at them for a moment, you'd see them stop, then they'd go back and look and look and say, 'What's this?'" Hiebert said.

Mr. Mutter's production dropped in recent years, as computers, which he never fully embraced, expanded the potential for photographic manipulation of the sort he had been doing by hand.

Some critics dismissed Mr. Mutter's work as kitschy, an assessment Hiebert roundly rebuked.

Mr. Mutter's montages "were anything but trite," Hiebert said. "They were well-thought-out, well-executed. People would rarely forget his photographs."

Mr. Mutter is also survived by a sister, Ann Reisner.