HOME TRUTH: IMAGE-MAKING IN ABSENCE

30 January -- 30 June 2026 @ The Lilley Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada

The photographic practice of Steven Seidenberg explores a material world of the unnoticed, fixing attention on structures, environments, and landscapes often hidden in plain sight. Three photographic series are combined in this exhibition; each focuses on past and present living conditions in a different place.

From Puglia and Basilicata in southern Italy, Architecture of Silence, depicts the remains of a post-World War II land reform movement and explores the place of the structures in the landscape, their contents, and their present reuse as storage and occasional housing for migrants.

Kanazawa Vacancy presents monochrome images of vacant domestic lots in Kanazawa (the second largest city in Japan to be spared WWII bombing) emphasizing the span of the vestigial structures that once stood, foregrounding a sense of the passage of time into a kind of inevitable, universal absence, a sense of the emptiness that undergirds the constructed landscapes of the enclave, wherever it occurs.

In Baobob: Tent City, Seidenberg’s images speak to the disorder and lack of predictability that comes with a life on hold in Rome, Italy. None of these makeshift homes exist anymore. Each was bulldozed and carted away under the direction and eyes of police. The photographs of the domestic spaces are the only systematic recording of Baobab from this period nearly five years ago — the tent city’s most populous time, and also its most vulnerable.

Seidenberg’s images capture place in a hauntingly beautiful manner, and in photographing current and former living spaces—houses, tents, outbuildings, and empty lots—he provides the viewer with ideas about the lived environment, how space is used, and how humans travel through and live within the spaces they occupy under wide-ranging material conditions.