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 in analog photography and printmaking, he engages with visual metaphoric language to portray relationships between the body and queerness involving himself, his family, and his close friends. 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 spent long hours in the ballet studio as a child, taking my body apart and building it back up over and over again. This repetitive motion of putting myself back together again and again taught me how to reinvent myself for any audience. 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. Now, I’m returning to these hiding spots I forgot I had, and I’m digging myself back up piece by piece. My images are echoes of these pieces of myself, and the shame and guilt I dig up as I untuck them.
Growing up between İstanbul and Abu Dhabi before I moved to Wilmington, Delaware at nine years old, I've performed different versions of my identity for different audiences for as long as I can remember. My work deals with how these constant shifts in my identity based on my environment affected my relationships and experiences as I grew up. I engage with themes of queerness, friendship, family, and the intangibility of memory by fragmenting and abstracting images in my photography and printmaking. My thorough and detail-oriented processes in the darkroom and printmaking studios allows me to physically embody the complex and overwhelming emotions I have gathered throughout my life. Examining myself and rebuilding myself in these photographs and prints creates a parallel to the various expressions of myself I’ve built throughout my life.
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 way my experiences have manifested in my body. I obscure and reveal detail through these processes to work through my unstable relationship between my body and identity. As I play with my imagery and expression these processes, I discover new ways of seeing, feeling, and being myself.