Seth Akgün
photographer & printmaker
Seth Akgün is a photographer and printmaker currently working between Baltimore and İstanbul. His work is informed by his experiences as a queer person in a multicultural context amid the fluctuating definitions of home and family. Working with traditional practices in analog photography and printmaking, he engages with abstraction to portray the complexities of relationships between the body, surroundings, and the self. Akgün has had work shown in galleries at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the Maryland Institute College of Art including the Main Zero, Decker, Pinkard, and Wilgus Gallery for a variety of solo and group juried exhibitions and is a recipient of the 2025 Winston Art Scholarship. Akgün has worked in freelance photography and graphic design, has interned at Aperture in Finance & Accounting and Public Programming departments, and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center assisting photography workshops. Seth Akgün is currently a senior pursuing a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
I've performed different versions of my identity for different audiences for as long as I can remember. Growing up between İstanbul and Abu Dhabi before I moved to the United States at nine years old, constant shifts in my environment fragmented my relationships and experiences. Ballet served as a constant in my life: I spent long hours in the ballet studio as a child, taking my body apart and building it back up over and over again. Through this physical repetition, I learned to examine myself intimately, and I learned where all the hiding spots within me were that I could tuck different bits of myself away. Returning to these hiding spots to untangle these memories and experiences, words often fail me as I try to articulate paralysing feelings of disconnection. By fragmenting and abstracting my images in my photography and printmaking, I am able to embody the complex and overwhelming dissonance between me, my body, and my surroundings.
Repetition and muscle memory still serve as constants in my life that connect me to my body and surroundings. Long distance running strengthens my relationship with my body and my surroundings as I have moved on from the ballet studio and working in printmaking and photography has replaced the more methodical practices of ballet. These processes have become my routine of slowing down and observing my body through the shapes, tones, and gestures embedded within me. I explore the confines of my body and my surroundings by making self-portraits as I try to reestablish my relationship with them both.
Using a large format view camera, I make weekly portraits of myself and my surroundings. After developing and printing these photographs in the darkroom, I scan and layer them in order to further abstract my body. Making photographs on film with tangible negatives, intaglio prints who exist also as copper plates, silkscreen prints whose negatives are burnt into and washed out of emulsion all physically realise the various diverging ways my experiences have manifested in my body. I obscure and reveal detail through these processes, untangling and mapping out all the points where my body and I converge and part ways. As I engage with my imagery and expression through these processes, I begin to reconcile with my body.