Steven Seidenberg is a lens-based artist. In his series/book, The Architecture of Silence, published by Contrasto Books, Seidenberg documents the abandoned lives in the Italian South and the failed post-war land reform movement (Riforma Fondiaria) to which the imaged structures and landscapes belong. These photographs approach both the material consequences of this movement but also reveals the poetic fragility of these haunting structures and objects.

Interview by Isabel Hou

Your work meets at a delicate intersection of desolation and aesthetic grandeur. How do you transcend the mundane to capture such beauty in decay?

I wouldn’t say that I hope to transcend the mundane, so much as reveal its character through the exploitation of compositional possibilities, and there are many ways in which this happens—but in photography in particular, the transposition of the depth of the visual field onto a flat plane asks of the artist certain consideration of the structure of the image in that frame. Most importantly in the depiction of decay—one might even call it ruination—is to use the aestheticization of the ruin to amplify the sense of loss and tragedy, rather than obscure it.

The ethereal quality of your photographs suggests a meditative engagement with your subjects. Can you elaborate on the underpinnings that guide your artistic vision?

I believe the meditative engagement you’re perceiving has to do with the compositional task of isolation in my work—of putting the viewer in the world alone against the image, with nothing but their own resources to guide them, or so it may appear. This is a kind of bracketing of the subject of the image from the rest of the world, an entirely artificial separation, confined by the physical limits of the frame, but also my conceptual and compositional structuring of the subject. I want to emphasize the solitude of the viewer in entering the world the image offers, and provide some kind of aesthetic pathways for its navigation.

Each image seems to convey the silence of a forgotten era. How do you channel the invisible narratives of these spaces into palpable visual poetry?

This is the result of the isolation of the viewer to which I refer in the last answer; one compels the viewer to enter the image, paradoxically by delimiting its range, by forcing the eye towards particular points in the composition, and deemphasizing—or excluding—other pathways, in the service of aesthetic, narrative, even ideological goals. This is what constitutes the photograph as an art most distinctly related to poetry and philosophy in the literary realm—and not, that is to say, the kind of narrative forms one finds in the novel. The condensation of distinct yet overlapping conceptual elements that the stillness of the photograph employs does not produce a story, but encompasses a world that it thereby both describes and transforms.

Your meticulous attention to the textures of decay is almost tactile. What techniques do you employ to render such a tangible sense of deterioration?

The photograph presents the possibility of emphasizing such textures by virtue of delimiting, once again—using all of the techniques of subject isolation lens-based media allow, i.e., depth of field or narrowing of focal width or use of color isolation/monochrome desaturation to bring certain elements that would otherwise remain liminal into sharp (and uniquely sharp) focus in the frame. Different techniques become necessary, depending on the circumstance of the capture—available light determines a lot, of course, and one approaches the flat plane of a wall or a floor differently from an image that extends into the landscape. Thus part of that emphasis that brings the liminal into the center of consciousness (whether or not it’s central to this or that image) is the shift of scale that different focal depths and lengths allow, a revelation by distortion and distraction, if you will.

The juxtaposition of historical resonance and contemporary desolation in your work is striking. How do you navigate this dichotomy to create such evocative imagery?

History is desolation—there is no other option; it seems to me the obligation of the artist to understand the contemporary as part of the continuum of that declination, once again, not as a kind of narrative arc, but rather as an ecstatic realization of this continuous catastrophe of the temporal. The seeming (which is to say, illusory) atemporality of the photograph allows for this evocation and manipulation in ways that are available to no other media.

The silent dialogue your photos establish between absence and presence is profound. How do you approach the conceptual challenge of capturing this elusive interplay?

Approach is the right word here; what I do not do is shoot this and that, or moments here and there. My projects are just that—projects. Part of what makes it possible to capture absence is the conceptual framework that defines an image within a series of images, just as negative space within a particular image is defined by the weight, as it were, of the positive within the same composition. One hopes that each image stands in its own right, while taking on a different set of complexities when considered in the context and the broader conceptual framework of its series.

Your exploration of these abandoned sites seems almost archaeological in its depth. What is the most intellectually stimulating discovery you made during your research and shoots?

As you perhaps know, I work closely with my partner, the archaeologist Carolyn White, who often writes analyses of the images I make, as well as the cultural contexts these images reveal, and the techniques I use in revealing them. But I would say that this kind of work, while compelled by and evoking both imagery and time scale similar to those same foci that motivate archaeological methods, does not ‘discover’ in the way the field archaeologist does—the literal dis-covering of what appears as notable, emblematic, etc. I am, rather, most often revealing what I know to be present, but to have been largely overlooked in favor of the commonplaces of visual culture, the mundane, as you put it earlier, that the ideological imperatives of that culture insist on making central to the view.

So I could say, for instance, that the way spring mattresses from the 1950s and 60s decay is quite beautiful and surprising, or that there is more human hair on the floors of the Tokyo subway system than I ever imagined—but these discoveries are not quite intellectually stimulating in the way that I think you mean. They are, however, so aesthetically and emotionally evocative my heart races in excitation.

In a world obsessed with perpetual renewal, your focus on ruins and remnants feels subversive. How do you perceive the cultural and existential implications of your work?

As alluded to above, I have a philosophical vision of temporality that understands renewal as ruination, and the entropic vector that defines the system—any system—of control or discernment as the bracketing index of ecstasis in the experience of beauty and sublimity alike. Indeed, I am a philosopher by training, and my understanding of my own art practice is a kind of extension from Kantian aesthetics through a materialism that reads perception as both dialectical and dialogical—the identification of substance, of constancy, of stasis is inclusive of its disappearance, the project of its dissolution; and each approach to a delimited series is an attempt to encapsulate the contradictions, allowing for an essentially ecstatic experience that empowers all of the other claims the work is making, even those of which I remain unaware. For me, that is to say, ecstatic experience (and all aesthetic experience is a form of ecstasis, I would argue) is essentially subversive, allowing its ideological portents to achieve a power no pedantic or pedagogical practice can approach.

The contemplative silence in your photographs speaks volumes. How do you mentally and emotionally prepare to engage with these spaces?

I think there are some who might read about my work and find it depressing, or assume based on such description that I am a depressive by nature, but it's simply not the case; it’s precisely the beauty in the midst of devastation, or the whimsy in the liminal detritus of the everyday, that brings me such great joy in the making of my own work, and the appreciation of the work of others, which is certainly a part of my practice (as it is for most artists, I think). I might even suggest that my practice as an artist in these spaces is what prepares me to engage with the rest of the world—what gives me strength and fortitude in presenting the work, in facing the political and social realities of the various art worlds in which I participate, and the push back against the broadly subversive nature of the work, to which you make reference above.

If you could ensure your photographic oeuvre could convey a message or feeling, what would it be, and why do you consider it paramount?

I want my work to be—I hope it is—overdetermined, irreducible to one position or emotive conceit. In order for work of this nature to be successful, I think it necessary to relinquish control of its effects; the resistance of the artifact to the artist's control is one of its great gifts to the artist. One might say that, paradoxically, I hope the work ensures that the ambiguity and complexities of its implications are present in every reading of it, allowing the viewer an experience of the sublimity of that conceptual abundance in the midst of the equally powerful aesthetic or compositional compulsion to enter the frame.

Author photo by Dino Ignani

Isabel Hou is a rising senior at Cornell University interested in art, writing, and law. She plans to live and work in Manhattan post-grad. When she’s not in New York, she’s based out of Colorado, where she enjoys the mountains, the art, and the solitude.

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