Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
John Schott, American, b. 1944
Schott is an American photographer, filmmaker, and academic whose work became widely recognized through his association with the influential New Topographics movement.
Schott first came to prominence when his photographs were included in New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, a seminal 1975 exhibition curated by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House. He exhibited alongside renowned photographers such as Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, collectively signaling a shift toward unromanticized, objective views of suburban sprawl and industrial landscapes.
In the summer of 1973, Schott drove Route 66 from the Midwest to California, sleeping in his pickup truck and photographing roadside motels and architecture with a large-format 8x10-inch Deardorff view camera. Twenty of these images were selected for the New Topographics exhibition, capturing the decay and artificial reality of pre-interstate automobile travel. The complete series was later published by Nazraeli Press as Route 66: 1973-1974.
Following his road trip project, Schott photographed mobile home communities along the West Coast between 1975 and 1976, which was similarly published as Mobile Homes: 1975-1976.
Beyond still photography, Schott is an accomplished filmmaker and producer. He co-directed documentaries such as America's Pop Collector (1973) and DEAL (1978), and served as the executive producer for the acclaimed 1999 PBS television series American Photography: A Century of Images.
Schott pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he studied photography under Phil Davis. In 1979, he joined the faculty at Carleton College as a professor of media and cinema studies, teaching there until his retirement in 2017.
Today, his photographic work is held in several major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum.
