Scott Mutter

His first show was at the downtown Chicago bookstore Brentano's in the mid 1970s. He then published calendars and posters through several publishing houses, including Avalanche Publishing. His best known work, Surrational Images, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1992.

Mutter was born to Charles and Lucille Mutter near the Rainbow Beach neighborhood of South Side, Chicago. He moved with his parents to suburban Park Ridge, Illinois, where he graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge in 1961. Mutter received a B.A. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1966 and a master's degree in Chinese studies in 1968. While at university he was part of the counter culture, or hippie culture. He protested against the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. He lived in Champaign into the early 1980s where he ran an antiques shop and showed classic and foreign movies in rented halls such as the McKinley Foundation or the Red Herring.

Scott Mutter (1944–2008) was an American photographer best known for the use of photomontage.

Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian filmmaker (1898–1948) and author of two books, The Film Sense and Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, greatly influenced Mutter's ideas about photographic "montage", a technique of combining and superimposing images into a single picture. Mutter believed "there are theoretical reasons why a montage works or is something. But you have to also understand and keep your mind open to the fact that what works, works. That's the bottom line." His images were an attempt to represent something that is reality, not physical but rather a representation through metaphor.