Phil Scalia
21 Prospect Street
Fort Plain, NY 13339

phisca@gmail.com


Greetings and welcome to my website, which I built and maintain using the old Dreamweaver.

I am a photographer, an artist and a teacher of Adobe Photoshop. For clients I shoot catalog and commercial work, mostly in the health care, education, and architectural fields. In addition I license travel, reportage, and model-released imagery via stock agencies. As a teacher I conduct workshops in Adobe Photoshop and in digital photography for kids and adults. My primary preoccupation these days is digital art; some of this work can be found at Village Hall Gallery in Sharon Springs.

Bio:
At a young age I became a devotee of A. Aubrey Bodine's weekly full-page pictorial photo in the Baltimore Sunpapers Sunday Magazine. Began walking around my neighborhood taking candid photos with a Brownie Hawkeye. These pursuits did not conflict with my status in school as a jokester and free-lance reprobate, which extracurricular activities were documented years later by my then-classmate Ellis "Otts" Weiner in an article titled "Class Clown, or Anarchoguerilla Liberator of Youth?" in the late great Spy Magazine. In high school I was lucky to have a teacher who turned the yearbook photography over to the students. I bought an old Leica, and on Saturdays would ride the Number Seven bus from the suburbs through the ghetto into the city, spend the day wandering around the streets of Baltimore, taking photos of derelicts. After graduating I worked as a hod carrier and a Good Humor Man, traveled out west to Haight-Ashbury and Maui with the handicapped poet Joshua Norton who became my mentor until his death in 1984. I squeezed in a college degree here. One summer I worked as a carny running the electric horse derby. Back to Baltimore, got a job right away as a tugboat cook on the Chesapeake Bay but was fired after one trip. The captain simply said "cooks don't need to read cookbooks" but I always suspected that the real reason was that I was taking too many pictures between meals. A fortuitous sequence of events led me into a training program with Conrail as a locomotive engineer. I spent the next seven years as a hoghead, running freight trains between Virginia and New York. During these years I self-published a book of photos, "Firing". Conrail periodically offered severance packages. I took the buyout and moved to New Hampshire, focusing energies on a career as a photographer. Worked for newspapers and as a “stringer” for UPI, then for twelve years owned and operated a commercial studio in the Odd Fellows Hall in Exeter. It was a beautiful space on the third floor with tall palladian windows that I exploited to showcase the work of poets such as my old friend Charles Plymell. One of my neighbors in town was a young novelist named Dan Brown. He asked me to take his portrait for a book he was writing called the Da Vinci Code. His publisher Random House was planning a heavy marketing blitz. I told him at the time it was going to be big.... Business was good in Exeter; it was actually so good that I grew to loathe being chained to a studio as I was trapped into shooting weddings and family portraits in order to pay the high expenses. I downsized, said goodbye to New England, rehabbed a foreclosed house in central New York State. I live in the bucolic Mohawk Valley, a region famed for its fertile black soil and the Iroquois Confederacy, with lovely summers and long winters.


To search or browse the stock archive, visit alamy images. I am also represented by New York Stock Photo

Latest News:

"Derivative" has been accepted into the Arkell Museum's Annual Juried Show, opening December 3, 2011.

In September of 2011, I was an official judge for the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Commission Annual Photo Contest, Waterford, NY

See my photos in the award-winning movie "Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling".


Some Recent Publication Credits:
Frommer's New York City 2011
Forbes, America's Prettiest Neighborhoods
Smithsonian, The Surprisingly Exciting World of Mushroom Picking
Travel and Leisure, America's Best Cities for People-Watching, Apr 2011
The Telegraph (UK), Guernsey Must Do More To Stop Money Laundering, Jan 2011
Forbes, Great American Castles, Dec 2010
Vogue Daily, Fashion Night Out at Macy's, Sept 2010
Travel and Leisure, New Orleans Attracts More Visitors, Aug 2010
MSNBC.com, America's Best Picnic Spots, Aug 2010
Elle Decor Magazine, March 2010, Elle Decor Goes To Baltimore
The Guardian (UK), The Mardi Gras King Cake, Feb 2010
Frommer's New York City, Silverman et al, 2010
Sacred Places of a Lifetime, National Geographic, 2010
The Mohawk, David C. King, 2010
Comcast.net, 10 Worst Cities For Jobs This Fall, Sept 2009
Bizarre, Creepy Hoaxes, Kelly Regan Barnhill, 2009
All Around New York, Regions and Resources, Heinemann 2009
Maryland, Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2009 - cover photo
Delaware, Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2009
Frommer's New York State 2009 - cover photo
All Around New York, Heinemann-Raintree, 2009
Atlantic Monthly, A Hundred Miles on the Erie Canal, October 2009, Rachel Dickinson
Exploring American History, Marshall Cavendish 2008
The Erie Canal, Lisa Bullard
Complete First Certificate Student's Book With Answers, Guy Brook-Hart
Macroeconomics, Roger A. Arnold
Amazing and Unusual USA, Jeff Bahr
New York Yesterday and Today, Meg Schneider
Joseph Brant and his World, James Paxton
Peru (Eyewitness Travel Guide)
World Music, Traditions and Transformations, Michael B. Bakan, 2007
The Huron, David C. King, 2007
Fodor's Peru, 3rd Edition
Where To Go When: The Americas, Joseph Rosendo
Fodor's Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire, 11th Edition
Fodor's New England, 28th Edition
Frommer's 24 Great Walks in New York, Michelle and James Nevius
Drugs and Society, Glen Hanson
New York Washington DC and the Mid-Atlantic Trips (Regional Guide), Karlin and Otis
Unexplained: An Encyclopedia of Curious Phenomena, Strange Superstitions and Ancient Mysteries, Judy Allen
The Rough Guide to New England 4, Ken Derry et al
Criminalistics: Forensic Science and Crime, James Girard
Handbook of World Religions, Len Woods
Visualizing Earth History, Loren Babcock
Seven Wonders of Ancient North America, 2008, Michael Woods
Under The Legislature of the Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets, Mark Decarteret
Floods, Mary Winget
Mansa Musa Leader of Mali, Lisa Zamorsky