Join us at the Griffin Museum for an in-person artist talk and book signing celebrating Grace, the poetic and deeply collaborative project by photographer Scott Offen, published by L'Artiere Edizioni. During this special event, Offen will share insights into his creative process, the evolution of the work, and the intimate partnership that shaped the images. A book signing will follow the conversation.
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In Grace, Offen and his partner craft a visual dialogue about aging, representation, and autonomy, moving fluidly between the quiet resonance of domestic interiors and the symbolic power of mythic landscapes. Their photographs trace a world where the everyday blurs into the fantastical, inviting viewers to consider how imagination can expand the boundaries of lived experience.
Grace will be on view at The Griffin @ WinCam from December 8, 2025 through February 12, 2026.
The haunting, expressive photographs in this publication can be perceived as evocations of a long and fruitful collaboration between two people whose lives have intertwined across many decades. Scott and Grace are parents, they share a profound commitment to their spiritual pursuits, they are each other's best friends. But above and beyond persevering together through the vicissitudes of life, they have, later in their relationship, found a way of making photographs that transcend the tradition of active man with camera and passive wife as sitter. Grace and Scott explore imagination, sense of play, and the possible meanings of the natural world. In the work, they fashion an escape from the bonds of this dimension with its cultural norms and strictures on our behaviors, especially those of women.
In the photographs they devise, Grace literally scales the walls that confine her to her quotidian milieu. On the other side she is delivered into a fairytale forest where logic and responsibility evaporate. In her wanderings, which are always depicted as solitary, she discovers signs and symbols generated by the forest in a reimagining of nature and the place of a modern human in it. Inside the house, Grace's presence is often implied: a hat, a jacket, a shadow, the fluff of dandelions. Outside, she is a Nordic goddess preparing for battle, a sylph resting beneath a tree, a deity of wildness. Women of a certain age become, sociologically speaking, invisible and are not much seen in art. Yet, for the camera, for Scott, for her own ends and ours, Grace operates freely, clearly seen and empowered in these images. She occupies her own unique and compelling alternate universe where she and Scott create narratives the viewer is impelled to interpret.
One should not think that Scott's role is only that of scribe or recorder of events; this is a mutual endeavor, one carefully planned and structured but also one that allows for response to what is found in the landscape, for spontaneous creativity. Scott works primarily with view cameras so the process is slow. There is time for conversation, for planning, for repeated takes. There is also time for Scott and Grace to develop this magical allegory together, an allegory in which the symbols may not be directly legible but one that questions what is knowable in nature, in marriage, between individuals, in one's own mind. Their combined inventiveness allows us -- the viewers of this beautiful, dreamlike body of work -- to climb out of our own familiar spheres and, for a moment or two or ten, partake of the liberty in theirs.
Laura McPhee
About the Artist
Scott Offen (b. 1960) is an East Coast photographer whose work has been exhibited across the country and featured online. His first monograph, Grace, was published by L'Artiere in 2025, followed by a book signing at AIPAD in New York City. That same year, he presented his first solo exhibition in Chelsea, New York City, at The Curator Lab.Scott holds both a BFA and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he received the Graduate Thesis Award in 2024. Offen uses a range of photographic formats from 8×10 to digital. His work has recently been reviewed by Forbes, L'Œil de laPhotographie, Sky Arte, Collater.al, Monochrome Masters, Collector Daily The Eye of Photography, What Will You Remember, Nowhere Diary and other publications. Grace was chosen for on the Shelf at the 2025 at the Filter Photo Festival.