LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Scott Offen: Grace by Vicente CayuelaDecember 12, 2025

East Coast-based photographer Scott Offen has recently published his debut monograph, Grace. In 72 pages, Offen presents a thoughtfully curated sequence of large-format view-camera photographs. Created in collaboration with his life partner of four decades, Grace, the images are intimate and enigmatic, revealing moments of introspection, tenderness, and adventure. The hardcover book was published by L’Artiere, a young publishing house specializing in photography volumes founded in 2013 by Gianluca and Gianmarco Gamberini. The work is currrently on view at the Griffin Museum of Photography through February 12, 2026.

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 la Photographie, 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.

Follow Scott Offen on Instagram: @offen1645

Follow L’Artiere: @lartiere

Scott Offen, Grace published by L’Artiere (2025, Italy)

Grace

Grace is a seven-year collaborative project between my partner Grace and myself, within the context of a 41-year intimate relationship. Our photographs are made entirely together. The intimacy we share allows us to examine how an older woman, Grace, might question aging, representation, invisibility, gender, and autonomy. The work also seeks to understand how domestic spaces and the freedom of the outdoors illustrate or complicate this query. Whether inside or outside, Grace is always by herself. The fairy tale landscape functions in the work as more than a backdrop. Like Wonderland or Oz, the natural world is depicted by turns as odd, scary or humorous. It is a character, shaping the narrative structure of the work. Indoors, traces of Grace’s presence are strongly felt even if unseen. Outdoors, she moves alone through mythic scenery, inviting viewers to consider how identity is formed in relation to the natural world.

Scott Offen, Grace published by L’Artiere (2025, Italy)

“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