Scott Wishart (2)

British photographer. Scott first went on the road when he was twenty, and spent much of the following decade ‘in-between’ places; whether it be a dusty highway in Wyoming or the jungles of East Africa. He had taken up photography as a hobby when he was thirteen years old, and by the time he reached his seventeenth birthday was carrying a 35mm SLR around with him all the time in his school bag. His ‘love affair’ with North America began in 1992 when he spent several months travelling all over the continent by Greyhound Bus. Destinations were often decided at the bus terminal and influenced by whichever service was leaving next. It was during this period that Scott first saw a copy of Robert Frank’s ‘Americans’ in a Kansas City bookshop and decided that his life belonged behind the lens. Later that year Scott took up a three-year degree course in photography at Staffordshire University (under the tutelage of the late Mike Berry) and within a couple of months of graduation in July 1995 he started shooting portraits for the Sunday Times Magazine, followed a year later by what would become an eight-year relationship freelancing for The Guardian and Observer newspapers. The North American trips continued (some self-funded, others on commission) and he began to build up a large library of ‘Americana’ that was subsequently gathered together in an online gallery during 2001 at americanaimages.com. As a result of the new website Scott began to regularly sell images for book covers and funded all future trips through sales from usage rights. To date he has supplied cover imagery for over one-hundred titles. Highlights during his years working in newspaper photojournalism included numerous travel and issue-based commissions such as photographing the coffee farming industry in Tanzania and an assignment to document the displaced children of the Colombian Civil War. Scott also worked on a great many Guardian ‘advertorials’ including the award-winning Cellnet ‘Big Trip’ in 1997. Scott made the change to digital in 2003 when he was asked to become one of the London stringers for the Scotsman newspaper but continued using film until early 2006 when his last analogue shoot involved photographing Joan Bakewell for a book cover. It was about this time that he started photographing features for Time Out magazine and working a great deal more in portraiture – mostly for book and record covers. Although being influenced quite early on during his career by the ‘greats’ of photography (Frank, Eggleston, Friedlander, Evans etc.), he also finds inspiration in a great many different areas. He has a great love of film and enjoys the cinematography of Conrad Hall, Roger Deakins and László Kovács as well as the films of Terrence Malik whose work he has adored since his eighteen-year-old self first saw Badlands. During the last decade he has developed a fascination for history, which began in early 2002 whilst researching his ancestral past, and is currently borne out in a Great War Centenary project wherein Scott is researching and writing biographies of all the men and women of the Wishart surname who saw overseas service during World War 1. He is also a member of the local war memorial steering group. Scott is represented professionally by Retna, Millennium Images, Alamy, Camera Press, Rex Features, Science Photo Library and Wildcard Images. He is married to ceramic artist Helen Rondell and based in Kent, where he lives with his son and twin daughters.