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.