Matt Herron studied photography in Rochester as a private student of Minor White, and then worked as a writer and photographer for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. A conscientious objector during the Korean War, Herron was organizing peace demonstrations and beginning to shoot assignments for Life and Look at the time the first sit-ins were occurring in Tennessee and North Carolina. In 1963, he and his wife, Jeannine, and their children, moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to join the civil rights movement.
In the summer of 1964, Matt Herron organized a team of eight photographers, The Southern Documentary Project, in an attempt to record the rapid social change taking place in Mississippi and other parts of the South, as civil rights organizations brought northern college students to work in voter registration and education.
In the 1970s, Herron retrained himself as a writer. For the next ten years he wrote articles for Smithsonian and other publications. He also became active with animal rights organizations, serving as bridge officer, navigator and photographer for the first two Greenpeace anti-whaling voyages.
During the 1980s, Herron became active with the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), and served as president from 1993 to 1995, and as international director and as chairman of Media Photographers Copyright Agency, ASMP's online marketing system for electronic images.
Matt Herron is the director of Take Stock, a picture agency specializing in images of social change, and dedicated to preserving and disseminating the history and images of the civil rights movement and migrant farm labor movement in the USA.
