Home in Absence: Steven Seidenberg's Vision. The interview
The lens-based artist reflects on absence as a compositional tool and the concept of "home" in the contemporary era
For his new solo exhibition, “Home Truth: Image-Making in Absence”, on view from January 27 to May 23, 2026, at the Lilley Museum of Art (USA), lens-based artist Steven Seidenberg reflects on his practice and the themes at the heart of his most recent research.
For years, Seidenberg has been investigating the material world of the invisible and the marginal: abandoned structures, landscapes marked by historical failures, urban environments suspended between presence and disappearance. This is, however, not a simple focus on the forgotten place, but rather a research that challenges our habitual way of looking.
His images do not seek the spectacular event, but rather focus on what remains after the event has passed, on what continues to exist on the edges of collective perception. In this sense, photography becomes for Seidenberg a critical tool: a device capable of slowing the gaze and removing it from the inertia of everyday seeing.
In “Home Truth”, three bodies of work—from the failed agrarian reform in the Italian countryside to the migrant tent cities of Rome, to the “akiya” and “akichi” of Kanazawa, Japan—intertwine in a visual meditation on absence, memory, and the very idea of ”home”.
Different geographical and cultural contexts are brought into dialogue through a common condition: that of spaces bearing the imprint of lives, promises, and interrupted projects. Landscape, architecture, and temporary structures thus become repositories of history, surfaces upon which one can read both the aspirations and fractures of the communities that have passed through them.
Through images almost always devoid of the human figure, the artist constructs a perceptual space that interrogates the viewer, inviting them not only to observe, but to participate in what is missing. Absence is not a decorative void, but a semantic tension: it suggests an off-screen presence, evokes a memory, and makes the viewer aware of their position within the image.
What emerges is a layered reflection on the material conditions of contemporary living and the fragility of the structures—physical and symbolic—that define our sense of belonging.
In this conversation, Seidenberg delves into the reasons for his attraction to marginal spaces, the role of absence in the construction of the image, and the meaning of the concept of “home” today, between anticipated nostalgia and an awareness of precariousness.
Your practice focuses on marginal and often overlooked spaces. What draws you to these places?
Indeed, my practice often focuses on settings and conditions—forms and structures that are otherwise unnoticed, despite their central placement in the scene—and such images help to establish a kind of uncanny distance between the work of the series in which they occur and the perceptual inertia of the viewer.
But even when I’m working in the midst of the quotidian, the goal is to provide that same push against the lethargy of normative seeing, opening the receiver to various conceptual and aesthetic possibilities that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
Your images are almost always devoid of human figures. What kind of presence do you still want to evoke?
Under certain circumstances, this exclusion seems a kind of exile, an evocation of tragic consequences, though this is not always the case. The absence of human form is also, paradoxically, a way of drawing the viewer into the image, of suggesting their place within it, not as observer, but participant.
Such a pose of empathy is impossible to achieve when the human form is present, at best a sight of sympathetic distance, but often enough an objectification of both the persons in the frame and their circumstances, indistinguishable, and thereby understood as in some sense deserved. In this way, I would suggest my images are more human for the deliberate absence of human presence in them, which has the added benefit of foregrounding, if you will, the compositional structure of the piece, otherwise overwhelmed by the central figure of the face.
In “Home Truth”, absence seems central. What can an image reveal through what’s missing?
I feel compelled to first distinguish absence as a compositional structure from absence as a semantic structure. Semantic absence, it must be understood, is the artist’s manufacture of a thwarted expectation, of a presence that diverges from the anticipated frame by virtue of exclusion, even when that exclusion happens by virtue of a view that’s somehow ‘full’.
Compositional absence, achieved by the placement of negative space within the field of view, is sometimes a useful tool in bringing out semantic absence; it’s certainly a tool I use in some of my work—in Home Truth, particularly in the series from Kanazawa, which presents the empty lots and spaces of a depopulating city.
But other absences are structural in different ways: as a framing of historical failure through the unexpected presence, say, of an abandoned housing development in the middle of a wheat field (my series The Architecture of Silence), or the cultural and social exigencies materially expressed in a migrant or unhoused encampment (Baobab). This latter example allows us to feel the presence of those living in the camp just outside the frame, but also their absence from their respective cultural origins, regardless of the proximity—or the facticity—of that imagined fold.
The concept of “home” runs throughout the exhibition. What does it mean to you today?
In the broadest sense—which is to say, beyond the socioeconomic and political implications of the particular scenarios the three series featured in the exhibition manifest—I mean to suggest how the notion of home always bears with it the future of its absence, a prospective nostalgia for its loss. That contemporary cultures conceive of home as stable and stationary is an effect of property relations, not a causal force in the making of those relations.
There is a kind of ecstatic release in realizing the illusory character of our attempts at permanence, an ecstasis that equally puts us into contact with our imminent disappearance, the certainty of our eventual exile from discernment.
In your work on Italian agrarian reform, what spoke to you more: the landscape or its historical memory?
For me, it’s impossible to distinguish the two; the landscape carries the historical memory, and is entirely structured by it. Certainly, one of the goals of the work—aesthetically and conceptually—is to express that unity, allowing the landscape to speak through the apertures of doors and windows, or by virtue of the incursion of various flora and fauna into interior spaces.
In the process, the landscape becomes the expression of an unrealized future, a retrospectively futile hope stuck in the brutal muddle of modern agricultural yields.
Photographing the migrant camp in Rome, how did your way of observing space change?
One might say that it was narrowed and subordinated to the fragile conditions in which I was working. The modes of timing any particular composition and the process of surrendering myself and my mode of seeing to the spaces I was imaging were necessarily structured around that fragility, focusing on the most basic ways in which a space is marked as the extension of one’s personage, one’s safety (even when one is relatively unsafe) and security (even when one is relatively insecure) and I hope the work in some small way expresses the volatility of those emotional and physical circumstances.
What struck you about the Japanese "akiya" and "akichi" compared to the European places you've photographed?
In many respects, what’s most striking are the material commonalities in the course of deurbanization, across cultures and historic periods. At the same time, the distinctive character of the artifice in any given place and time presents a kind of singularity within the framework of material decline, and that is certainly something I’m aware of in a place like Kanazawa, whose vestiges of a long and remarkable history are unmistakably present in every iteration of development and redevelopment equally.
Nonetheless, the philosopher in me pursues the universal that arises precisely from such considerations of the singular—and this proclivity serves as the expressive voice of my work, across series and platforms.
After this exhibition, what places or themes do you feel you’d like to move toward?
It’s a difficult question to answer, not because I don’t have thoughts on future projects and exhibitions (indeed, the curators of ‘Home Truths’ hope to travel the show, a hope I share), but because I feel the need to resist my inclinations and presumptions about possible photographic futures, in deference to the unique access of lens-based art—and my work in particular—in aleatoric response.
This is not to say I won’t continue to pursue the sorts of projects and series I have in the past, but that it’s impossible for me to faithfully imagine what novel foci and forms of practice will find impetus to expression in my oeuvre or my voice.
Of course, some things have been in the works for a while, like this show and its future iterations, or the photobook of the Kanazawa series due out from Chin Music Press in the fall of this year, but where new series will arise and find an avenue for dissemination is thrillingly unknown, as it always has been and will be.
An example of this—the current show, and the Lilley Museum where it’s showing, will also produce a symposium, bringing together critics, curators, art historians, and artists, in conversation about the work, which will undoubtedly yield novel insights and new directions, both in consideration of previous projects and in future pursuits.
Interview by Fabio Pariante: X • Instagram • Website