Steven Seidenberg, Untitled, from his series The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South. Courtesy of the artist

Too often, photographers play with images of ruin aesthetics with the aim of triggering a sense of lament, but Steven Seidenberg takes a different approach—his camera has captured the change of time in structures as diverse as pipe valves in Berlin and Venice, decaying plastic flowers in mausolea in Genoa, and most recently, squatted or abandoned buildings. In each, he foregrounds the stories of the people who created them or lived in them with sympathy and an eye toward resilience.

One of his most iconic projects is The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South, which uses photography to examine the failed land reform movement for impoverished families known as the Riforma Fondiaria. Due to the lack of necessary infrastructure, the plan failed, leaving countless concrete structures behind in what are now agricultural fields. Many buildings were abandoned for one reason or another: the construction stopped or the industry inside the building shut down. The focus is on how people lived or live within such structures and how they transformed difficult or almost unlivable conditions into compelling spaces.

“These places are expressive and often quite comfortable and creative, despite being difficult because of the lack of services and access to public utilities, which is extremely stressful to manage and too often taken for granted today,” Seidenberg tells Observer. People led complex and compelling lives in these places, which he finds both aesthetically and philosophically interesting.

Another project of note is Squatting in Rome: Salumeria Apartments. One of the spaces he encountered in his research was a hotel colloquially called the Four Star Hotel (4 Stelle Occupato). Initially owned by a bank, it was a vacant piece of real estate before being reoccupied, housing around 500 people. With the help of several intermediaries, Seidenberg documented spaces converted from hotel rooms into fully fledged apartments. “It means trying to make a kitchen and other things within spaces that are not designed to house a full life. These are comfortable yet extremely marginalized spaces,” he explains.

This type of documentation must be executed with care, Seidenberg adds. “It is done only with explicit and clear permission from the occupants of the spaces. It’s more than voluntary. It’s almost a request.” As a photographer coming from outside the community, especially politically organized ones, he only works through liaisons already trusted by these communities. Such trust is often enough to start a conversation with residents—word of mouth is sometimes the only way to gather information about their lives, such as their contacts, location of particular residences and reasons for abandonment.

But perhaps surprisingly, these communities of squatters sometimes have such a huge sense of accomplishment that they’re eager to show the world the dramatic transformations they’ve executed and what it’s actually like to live in one of these buildings. Still, Seidenberg admits, some prefer not to have their spaces documented in photographs, and each resident’s perspective has to be fully respected. “It is apparent that, when you approach these communities, you cannot have a camera or cell phone in your hand. It has to be in your backpack. Everything has to be fully consented to before anything happens.”

Steven Seidenberg, Untitled, from his series Squatting in Rome: Salumeria Apartments. Courtesy of the artist

His collaboration with these communities is also unique in the fields of photography and historic preservation. Unlike cultural anthropology, it’s not a narrative constructed through ethnography or language but one told only through visual documentation of domestic conditions. “We certainly don’t claim any expertise in that regard. The works just show what life can be like in those circumstances in ways that are aesthetically compelling,” Seidenberg emphasizes.

Yet even as he downplays his photographs’ sociological significance, his works have served as evidence of marginalized communities under threat. Carolyn White, Seidenberg’s partner and long-term collaborator, is a professor of archaeology and director of the Preservation Studies Program at Boston University. “No place survives,” White tells Observer. “These photographs end up being the documentation for their future destruction, essentially. We’ve already seen that in some projects where those spaces are either under severe threat or have been destroyed.” It happened to Baobab, a tent city for asylum seekers in Rome. Shortly after Seidenberg and White completed their documentation in 2018, Baobab was illegally destroyed by the police. Though an organization helping that population—in particular, its unhoused immigrants—still exists, it is unable to provide a safe place on the tent city’s previous scale.

Seidenberg’s work challenges the conventional tropes of ruin aesthetics through an emphasis on community and ethics. “People are surprised that my only series about fully abandoned places is about Basilicata and Puglia (The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South).” His other series depict places that were once abandoned and are reoccupied or structures of human habitation that underwent transformation in relationship to the city, such as the pipe-cleaning valves in Berlin (Pipevalve: Berlin) and the utility access point doors in Rome (Rome Squares). “They all reflect the ways a city responds to its occupants and environmental circumstances, but they’re actively used in some way or other.”

Seen through another lens, Seidenberg’s subjects might be melancholic or despondent. But “when people look at my Kanazawa Vacancy Series, they don’t have a sense of despair at all. It comes from the aesthetics of the images when I approach and compose them. It’s not a critical exposition of Kanazawa. It’s a celebration, in a certain way, of how the world changes as circumstances within an urban environment change.” Here, vacancy doesn’t mean blight—it is simply evidence of a place accepting what happens when spaces change, perhaps as the non-human world reclaims them. “It is such an abstract moment because the things create boundaries and the juxtaposition of the old against new, or the future. You don’t know when or where they were from. You just see the physical remains of what people have created,” White adds.

Seidenberg’s works are engendered from the conceptual constraint of the political movements that yielded these particular abandoned houses. Each project focuses on a fairly small area; The Architecture of Silence was photographed exclusively in the Italian South between Matera and Altamura. “There is sadness and melancholy in these photos from Basilicata and Puglia, in particular, but it’s not sentimental, nostalgic, or romanticizing decay. The ways in which the non-human world interacts with these elements is hopeful on a certain level.”

What stands out are Seidenberg’s angles, which let us gaze through thresholds of doorways and windows. It feels elemental, but from his perspective, it’s a technical challenge. “It is an extraordinary thing to do, made possible by contemporary technology, though it’s not an intended consequence of these new sensors,” he explains.

What he loves about those compositions is that the sharpness in the details from blown highlights is lost in the taking, which gives the them a painterly characteristic and a dream-like absence of detail. These qualities reflect the dreams of the occupants, whose lives were not fulfilled, through no fault of their own. “It is sad, but that dream still exists, and can still exist. It’s still legible, even after all of this time, which has the optimism about what’s possible when we think about people’s lives and how we remember them.”

Seidenberg’s photography practice is informed by a lineage of photographers and philosophers who reshaped our understanding of the medium. As an undergraduate, in addition to writing on poetry and philosophy, he worked with Stephen Shore, one of the great American photographers who has taught at Bard College. Through him, he got to know the landscape photographers who came together in the groundbreaking exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” in 1975-76. “Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz and William Eggleston are all important photographers to me in terms of learning.”

After getting a PhD in Philosophy at Boston University, Seidenberg decided that a career as an academic philosopher was not for him. (He didn’t enjoy evaluating students and wanted a sense of independence from institutional life.) In his 30s, he started to pursue photography professionally, but it wasn’t an easy path. “For those who may be reading this article and trying to have a life as a fine arts photographer, the difficulty is to figure out where one’s voice is. What constitutes your voice is you as an artist discovering things that interest you and are actually identifiable and distinguishable over the course of your work, which comes from experience. It’s important to have a visual language that intrinsically comes out of you in your selection of images, so that one would look at your photograph and immediately know whose work that is.”

Finding his artistic voice included reviewing existing literature on photography through a critical, analytical lens. He sees the work as a partially philosophical project—taking an image apart to understand why a composition works—but acknowledges that “not everyone is inclined to do that. If you do, you’re not going to be an artist, or at least an artist who can make compositions that are voiced.” Nonetheless, he still thinks it’s important to read photography theory by philosophers and critics like Vilém Flusser or Susan Sontag. “There are hundreds of millions of people who take up photography now, especially with social media. It’s great in certain ways, but it also means that there’s lots of noise that one has to cut through. You don’t have to agree with what the theorists say about photography, but they can help you understand why certain photographs make you feel a certain way.”

Steven Seidenberg, Untitled, from his series Kanazawa Vacancy. Courtesy of the artist

Then, of course, there are the deliberate aesthetic choices he has made over time. “I have favorite lenses, as all photographers do. I sometimes use very old lenses—there’s something special about it not resolving in a way that contemporary optics do,” he explains with a great deal of passion. His favorite is the version 2 of the Leica 35mm focal length summicron, which he used to shoot the Neolithic Dorset series, the only pure landscape series he’s published. Sometimes he shoots photos in color but converts them to monochrome later to create a particular ambience: “if you make monochrome images, you eliminate many distracting details. Color renders as objective in a flat field. For example, if you have a red chair and a green chair next to each other, then that’s the composition. If it’s in black and white, you just have two chairs and they don’t become the centerpiece of the composition.” As in his Kanazawa Vacancy series, which documents the complex urban landscape of akiya (vacant houses) and akichi (vacant lots) in Japan, the monochrome palette keeps the focus on the relationship between negative space and positive space in narratives of decay.

Seidenberg uses the phrase “musical minimalism” in his artistic statement to describe his position on abstraction and repetition. The term refers to the repetition of forms in the style of musicians such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and, most famously, Philip Glass. For Seidenberg as a writer and as a photographer, it’s the repetition of compositional or semantic structure that matters. “When you hear slight changes in repeated forms, you are able to distinguish differences that would otherwise be inaccessible to your auditory system as your focus narrows so radically. I hope my series also helps to narrow the focus in that way.”

In The Plastic Flowers of Staglieno, long-lasting plastic flowers in mausolea in Staglieno, Genoa, are exposed to wind, rain, dirt and dust, becoming the detritus of the world. The colors lost by exposure to sunlight and the shapes of plastic decay create a sense of uncanniness and an interpretation of temporality that is only visible with the repetition of flowers captured over and over again across the region.

Beyond technical and compositional concerns, Seidenberg believes that empathy and social engagement can lead to excellent aesthetic decisions. He strongly admires photographer John Divola’s project LAX NAZ (The Los Angeles International Airport Noise Abatement Zone), which captured houses immediately adjacent to LAX before they were torn down for the airport’s new runway noise buffer in the 1970s. To get the ideal interior and exterior shots, Divola purposefully brought additional lights to the scenes for these monochrome photographs. “The reason to use lighting here is to undermine the naturalness of the scene,” Seidenberg explains. “The emphasis is on how the light is artificial and imposed, which creates extremely powerful voicing of the photographs with a sense of uncanniness, as opposed to how influencers might use lighting on Instagram, which is artificial in another way. With social media, people have now come to think that the Instagram-perfect lighting for portraits is natural, but it’s not.”

Steven Seidenberg, Untitled, from his series The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South. Courtesy of the artist

What he wants viewers of his own photographs to take away is not a sense of pity for those whose dreams were dashed but a sense of resonant empathy. It’s part of why he doesn’t include people in his photos: “If people are in the images, it distances the viewers from the circumstances. They will make all kinds of judgments about who that person is rather than thinking about the circumstances in which the person is living. The objectification of personhood with images of people’s bodies and faces is what people play with, but it’s a dangerous thing to do. It’s dangerous for the people being photographed and dangerous for the photographer and viewers, too.”

Seidenberg, who considers himself a didactic photographer, adds that “sometimes what people want in photographs is a way of making people into objects, but I want to force, lure, or coerce people to think something else.” With his images of domestic circumstances, he wants viewers not to think “What a shame that someone else has to live like this,” but rather “What would it be like for me to live like this?”

Ultimately, Seidenberg’s artistic choices create a narrative of the temporality in our society. “Photography can be aleatoric,” he states. “It’s about chance occurrence and the presentation of it within the moment, because temporality introduces aleatoric elements into our lives at all times. We are experiencing unexpected and unpredictable novelty. It may be liminal for us, but it’s there. This is one of the places where indexical photography has an access that other arts don’t.”

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