SCOTT CHAMBERLIN: PHOTOGRAPHY & VIDEO

Gallery: Chamber Music & Orchestra

Intimate, live performance is to me an essential counterbalance to so much of life — to the dehumanizing effects of AI, to the depersonalization of our lives lived digitally, to the brutal scale and casual violence of mass-produced media, to our collective fears for the future.  What may be lost in human connection comes right back when performers and an audience sit next to each other, considering the greatest works together as speaker and listener like two loving people sharing a table. In chamber music, songs, melodies, rhythms, phrases, and gestures are passed down from artist to artist, generation to generation, and style to style, continuing to grow and develop along with the shared repertoire given to us by composers near-to or far-away.

View as a gallery

This medium has never been more relevant or timely, and as a photographer I am perpetually surprised by the new things I see, learn, and know in new fresh performances of familiar or unfamiliar songs. Most of the photographs here are from performances of the Da Camera Society and Salastina, which present these traditional forms in often unexpected locations, to dynamic and expansive audience. These words — and my photographs too — do not do justice to the experience of witnessing such beautiful, humane, and human fine art played for small audiences, inside meaningful architectural spaces.

Gallery: Recently Published…

in the Los Angeles Times, People magazine, La Presse, and the social media and websites of
IndieCade, Pluralistic School One, Santa Monica Youth Orchestra, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Santa Monica, and more.

Gallery: Sustainable Pelagic Fisheries in Ghana

In 2023, I accompanied U.S. government evaluation teams to coastal Ghana, where I helped document sustainable pelagic fisheries. The work was carefully integrated with local organizations that were working to improve ovens used for smoking fish (vastly improving air in the village at a small cost), improve working conditions for the mostly women who process fish, enforce fishing seasons, and fight against the encroachment of illegal fishing practices such as the use of TNT, poison, and light. I was able witness a “story circle” where fisherpeople discussed challenges to these activities, and a ceremony that deputized young fisherpeople (not pictured here) in this enforcement process to help restore and rebulild pelagic fish stock and fishing traditions for future generations.

Gallery: Sustainable Cocoa Farming in Ghana

In 2023, I accompanied U.S. government evaluation colleagues on a scoping trip, to document the process of interviewing recipients and some of the outccomes. The project was an intricately and efficiently implemented effort to provide cocoa farmers with what they needed to help bring us chocolate and preserve forests — and to resist the lure of illegal gold mining, which destroyes riverbeds, forests, traditions, communities, and families. The cocoa farmers were deeply committed to this course, and also extraordinarily kind and grateful to their American visitors.

Gallery: La Presse, Canada

“Les Etats-Unis Vus Par Leurs Enfants” by Laura-Julie Perreault, 11/6/2016
photographs by Scott Chamberlin

Book: IndieCade — A History: the Interdependence of Independents

by Celia Pearce, with photography by Scott Chamberlin & Friends
Published in 2020 by Carnegie Mellon ETC Press, 108pp.

Gallery: Rock & Theater

Here are a few shots from appearances by Omar Torrez, Tom Freund, the Milky Way, Richard Luov, Eastcoast, the Actors Gang, and other luminaries.

Gallery: On the Street

“Both before and after an assault by a paranoid schizophrenic on the streets of Santa Monica in 2017, the photographer processed his daily walking commute through a prominent neighborhood of one of the highest-income cities in the world, where people of means brush shoulders with those who have fallen well outside of the social net. There are no simple social dynamics here: while some passers-by seem not to notice the misery they walk through, others stop and try to help, and most exist somewhere between those two poles. For those for whom the streets nightly become a bed, the amount of effort it takes to live day by day is clear and heartbreaking. The photographs try to preserve some level of anonymity as the camera is at once in public and in a space which should also be private. However, within only a few days the people who live on the street are as undeniable and as recognizable as the buildings, so averting the eyes only becomes another effort to deny their presence.”

Gallery: In the Wake of the Woolsey Fire

“I drove out to Liberty Canyon this Saturday, November 17 [2018], to visit the California live oak trees that characterize California’s coastal landscape: the mighty green-gray luminaries of the golden rolling hills. Today the smoke sat in the air as the Woolsey fire continued to burn in the distance, and the oaks sat alone in a newly desolate landscape. Their survival seems unlikely, but what few humans — even local ones — seem to know is that if healthy, the California live oak is resilient to fire; in fact it thrives in a landscape cleared periodically this way. So they stand still, alive, moist, in fields of ash, seeming to know exactly what they are doing. And in normal times, with normal rainfall, they do know what they’re doing…“

Gallery: New York State in the Smoke of Canadian Wildfires

“Like the TV detective destined to solve a murder on every vacation, I seem to confront climate change every time I take a pleasant country drive. Or… maybe it’s not just me? This is central New York, around Homer, during the June 2023 Canadian wildfires that cast a pall on the entire northeastern United States. The plan was to chase the red barns and young green spring corn against bright blue skies, but the climate had another plan.”