Scott Strazzante
Photographer
Scott Strazzante was born in Evergreen Park, Illinois in 1964 and raised in the shadows of the steel mills on the far southeast corner of Chicago. The son of a tire dealer, Strazzante first became interested in photography when he started taking his dad’s camera to Chicago White Sox baseball games.
In 1986, after graduating from Ripon College, Strazzante began his photojournalism career when he was hired part-time at The Daily Calumet in Lansing, Illinois. In 1987, Strazzante moved on to the Daily Southtown in Chicago and then migrated to the Joliet Herald-News in 1998, where three years later, he was named National Newspaper Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association and the Missouri School of Journalism.
In 2001, Strazzante started a 13 year run at the Chicago Tribune where he was part of the Chicago Tribune team that won a Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting in 2007 for a series about faulty government regulation of dangerously defective toys, cribs and car seats.
In 2008, MediaStorm published Common Ground, a multimedia piece on Strazzante’s personal project on the transformation of a piece of land in suburban Chicago from rural to suburban. The 27-year-long project, which wrapped up in late 2021, has also been published in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Mother Jones and National Geographic and featured on CBS Sunday Morning. The project has also been honored with POYi's Community Awareness Award and 1st place in Feature Video in the NPPA's Best of Photojournalism contest.
In 2014, Common Ground was released in book form by PSG.
After winning the title of Illinois Photographer of the Year an unprecedented 11 times, Strazzante headed West and took a staff position at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2014.
In 2017, Shooting from the Hip, a collection of black and white street photography from across the US became Strazzante’s second book.
The American family farm gives way to a subdivision - a critical cultural shift across the U.S. Common Ground is a 27-year document of this transition, through the Cagwins and the Grabenhofers, two families who love the same plot of land.