Larry Halff

Larry Halff is a Wasington, DC area artist exploring how the external world we build, create and inhabit affects our inner world. His work amplifies the unconscious impact space, form, and light have on our psyches. By encouraging a conscious awareness of our environment, his images evoke an emotional response to buildings, creating a sense of reconciliation, calm and a positive shift in mood.

Born in Champaign, IL in 1970 and raised in Arlington, VA by two cognitive research psychologists, art has always helped him find a way to connect the internal self with the larger world. Camera in hand since the age of 6, he's self-taught in photography. After shooting the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin on a college foreign study program that he first felt a deep connection to a building and the first spark of this international body of work.

Although he's engaged in visually creative endeavours throughout his life, he studied Sociology and Cultural Anthropology and spent his career in software during the emergence of the widely distributed Internet and World Wide Web. After his father’s death in 2015, he was moved to pick up my camera and explore art as therapy seriously. In 2017, he made a series of images of the Colline Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France (for which he's working to attain rights) which persuaded him to share his perspective through the lens and to start distributing his work in 2021.

His practice juxtaposes the temporary and permanent, using images made with a digital camera (primarily a rangefinder, but sometimes even his phone) as a source to produce analogue, archival-quality silver gelatin black and white prints. He applies minimal processing in post-production, striving only to crop, and sometimes making occasional exposure and tone adjustments.

Exhibitions

2021 FAVA’s Juried Biennial Photography Show, Architecture Award, FAVA Gallery, Oberlin, OH
2021 Architecture, New York Center for Photographic Art, New York, NY
2021 Members' Juried Exhibition, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
2021 Art in the Time of Corona, Vol. 2, DAB Art, Los Angeles, CA
2021 Exposure: Architectural, ArtGym Denver, CO

Education

The University of British Columbia, Master of Arts, Curriculum Studies at the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab, Vancouver, BC, Canada (1993 - 1996)

Earlham College, Bachelor of Arts (Honors), Sociology/Anthropology, Richmond, IN, USA (1988 - 1992)