The Verve: Photographer exposes the differences

To photographer Geoff Scanlan, it’s all about perception.

“I’m inspired in how we can all look at the same objects yet see completely different things,” he said. “It shows how our individuality is based on our experiences and perceptions.”

Scanlan grew up in Spokane. He attended Lakeside High School, admittedly as a rebellious youth.

“I was the classic story of not being challenged enough,” he said.

He took art classes but was turned off by the rigidity of them. Still, he spent much of his spare time in the art room. Later, he took art-related classes at Spokane Falls Community College. He worked in sales and moved up to management. “It was good money but felt empty,” he said, “There’s so much wrong in the way we live but it’s hard to question the paradigm because it’s what we’re taught.”

His most rewarding work has been working with the developmentally disabled.

Scanlan has always felt a little bit separate. About four years ago, his feelings were diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder. Today, he is four years sober, accepting himself for who he is, and finding comfort, even healing, in creating and sharing how he sees things.

“Art helps me feel more directly connected with my emotional self, something that I can quite often feel detached from,” Scanlan said. “We all have our weaknesses and struggles, but they can be a source of strength if channeled well.”

His photography plays with the idea of perception and perhaps the identity of his subjects, the animate and inanimate which he gives life to like an abandoned room that holds secrets or smoke that appears to move. He is drawn to the tragic beauty of people and things, the sad and the seemingly forgotten, the dusty, rusty, peeling, cracking, and the barren, and finds beauty in it. He plays with light and, in his portraits, he adds texture to the skin or background.

“The more I have studied photography, I have really grown to love how you can compose objects and your surroundings or capture what’s in front of you and, using changes in composition and lighting, present it in a way no one else sees it,” he said.

Scanlan is studying massage therapy and setting up a working studio on East Sprague Avenue. He has shown his work at the Liberty Building and Terrain. Soon, he will start melding his portrait work with his urban-landscape work and start incorporating mixed media into his photography. He also hopes to collaborate with other visual artists.

“Art has been so much to me and will always be a part of my journey as I try to be the most that I can be,” he said.