Scott MacLeay

Scott MacLeay (born March 25, 1950) is a Canadian photographer, composer and new media artist. His images, like his music, often deal with juxtapositions of fragmented elements in multilayered environments. He began his career in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in the later 1970s, moving to Paris in 1979. In 2010 he moved to Florianópolis, Brazil.
Education.
Scott MacLeay earned an Honours B.A. degree with a major in economics from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario in 1972 and a Master of Science degree in economic theory specializing in development economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1974. He left his doctoral studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1975 to pursue a career in photography.
Work.
He gained notoriety in the early 1980s for his color series "Attitudes" incorporating detail-free, graphic figures in flat two-dimensional fields, first exhibited in 1980 at the Space Gallery of Pete Turner, Ernst Haas, Jay Maisel in New York. 
In 1981 he began collaborating with the Fresson family for the printing of his work. The luminosity of the pigment-based, Fresson charcoal process was ideally suited to the texture-free, color palette he was exploring. In 1982 his work was included in the Life Library of Photography in the volume dedicated to the Art of Photography.
His work has been exhibited widely in Europe, N. and S. America and Japan and was represented by the Galérie Ufficio dell'Arte / Créatis in Paris and the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in New York where he exhibited both quadrichrome and dichromatic work during the 1980s. He participated in both solo and group exhibitions for the Biennale Mois de la Photo de la Ville de Paris in 1980, 1982 and 1988. His photographs are in included in private and museum collections worldwide.
In 1980, he founded the Photography Department at the American Center for Artists in Paris becoming Director of its Center for Media Art and Photography in 1985 following in the footsteps of founder Don Foresta and Anne-Marie Stein.
In 1982 he began composing experimental music for contemporary dance for American and French choreographers including Robert Kovich, Ruth Barnes, Marc Vincent and Jean-Marc Matos in collaboration with French choreographer François Raffinot. Musical composition became his principal activity by the end of the 1980s and in 1988, he formed Private Circus, an informally structured musical research group, that made two CDs on the French independent label Sordide Sentimental: the contemporary cabaret opera Les Petites Foules (SSCD004, 1990) and a compilation of music created for contemporary dance La Moitié de L'Histoire (SSFP99, 1994).
In 2010 he settled in Florianópolis, Brazil where in addition to returning to photography and new media work, he also curates exhibitions of young Brazilian new media artists and writes on conceptual approaches to photography. He has directed workshops / portfolio critiques at various events such as Floripa na Foto (2011 and 2013) and the Festival de Fotografia de Tiradentes (2013/2015/2018/2019/2020) as well as at institutions such as the SESC Santana and SESC 24 de Maio, São Paulo (2014/2017/2018). His book of essays on photography "Pensar, Sentir, Ver: Percepção e Processo em Fotografia" (Thinking, Feeling, Seeing: Perception and process in Photography) was published in 2015.
Since 2017, Macleay's work has been increasingly dedicated to exploring interactive, non-linear storytelling, employing photography, video and audio. The first phase of his transmedia project Encounters in the Right and Left Hemispheres was completed in December 2019: an interactive book of the same named published in February 2020.
In 2018, his cultural action company CREATIVE PROCESS, founded in 2011, began publishing books in the field of new media. To date, five books have been published including two devoted to MacLeay's work: Quadrichromie 1978–1988 (2018) and Encounters in the Right and Left Hemispheres (2020).