January Photo Chat Chat | Amy Herman, Jeff Larason, Rebecca Sexton Larson and EE McCollum

Happy 2021! It’s time to Photo Chat Chat.

Join us January 7th at 7pm Eastern in the Griffin Zoom Room for a great conversation with four very different stories.  We are bringing together the talents of four unique artists – Amy Herman, Jeff Larason, Rebecca Sexton Larson and EE McCollum.

Our Photo Chat Chat is a monthly conversation bringing together four members of the Griffin community to share their work, ideas and creativity with a broader audience. We are thrilled to bring together these artists who have unique perspectives on creativity and the world they inhabit.

This event is FREE to Griffin Members. Not a Member? Get more information about our Membership levels.

Here is a look at the artists we are featuring this month.

Amy Herman

© Amy Herman, from series Inheritance, “mom’s mom’s mom’s hands”

Amy Herman is an artist based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and her BFA in Fine Art from Michigan State University. Her photographs have been shown on the international level and are included in the permanent collections of the Kiyosota Museum of Photography, Cassilhaus, and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She teaches photography at Central Piedmont Community College and co-directs Goodyear Arts.

Jeff Larason

© Jeff Larason, from series Sonder

Born in the Midwest, Jeff Larason has been a street photographer since the 80’s. His street photography reflects his interest in places and the ways people interact with their environment.

Larason has been a “hip shooter” from early on, rarely looking through the lens to make an image. He is a founding member of the Boston Streets Collective, a group of street photographers.  His recent book project, “Sonder,” has been done, in part, with an iPhone, a camera that allows him proximity without affecting the subject.

Professionally, Larason has made a career in radio and television and in highway safety for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Larason’s exhibitions include shows a Grand Prize Award from the New York Center for Photographic Art as well as shows in Boston, Cambridge, Portland (OR) and Portland (ME), St. Paul, Atlanta, Glasgow (Scotland), Wichita and Queens (NY).   He has been published in the Boston Globe, These Streets, Camera and Darkroom, UK Daily Mail, BAM Magazine, and Stuff Magazine.

Rebecca Sexton Larson

© Rebecca Sexton Larson, Fear of Sleep

Rebecca Sexton Larson is a Tampa based studio artist working with photographic processes. She graduated from the University of South Florida with degrees in Fine Arts and Mass Communications. Sexton Larson has been awarded three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships (1998, 2002, and 2008). In 2006, she received an Artist Enhancement Grant from the State of Florida and, in 2005, was commissioned by the City of Tampa as its Photographer Laureate. As Photo Laureate, she documented from her perspective the visual poetry of Tampa using a pinhole camera combined with one-of-a-kind hand-painted b/w photographs.

Recently, Sexton Larson accepted a grant from the State of Florida to attend the recognized Creative Capital Professional Development Program that supports innovative artists across the country through funding, counsel, and career development services. Sexton Larson’s photographs are in numerous significant collections throughout the country, including Polaroid; Progressive Corporate Art; Graham Nash (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young); Polk Museum of Art (Lakeland); Cassilhaus (Durham, NC); Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg); the Tampa Museum of Art (Tampa); Historical Museum (Santa
Fe); and Candela Gallery (Richmond, VA). Many of her one-of-a-kind works are in private collections.

Her photographs have been featured in photographic publications including Salted Paper Printing by Christina Z. Anderson, The Polaroid Project by various curators, Poetics of Light: Contemporary Pinhole Photography by Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer, View Camera Magazine, Black and White Magazine, Square Magazine, Afterimage, and others.

EE McCollum

© EE McCollum

E. McCollum works in both digital and analog formats to produce primarily black and white images.  A native of Iowa, McCollum spent 26 years in the greater Washington, DC area, but has recently relocated to Santa Fe, NM, following retirement from a 40-year career as a psychotherapist and college professor.  McCollum has been making pictures since elementary school and became serious about fine art photography in 2004.  A formative earlier experience was taking a course in the history of photography with Beaumont Newhall in the early ‘70s at the University of New Mexico.  McCollum’s work includes working with dancers in the studio as well as exploring the suburban environment at night and, during the ongoing pandemic, a self-portrait project.  His work has appeared in Lenswork,  Adore Noir, Shadow and Light Magazine, PH Magazine, Digital Photographer (UK), Stern (online), L’Oeil de la Photographie, and elsewhere.  He has exhibited in solo and group shows for the past 15 years and is an Editor-at-Large at Shadow and Light Magazine.