B I O/ S T A T E M E N T
Gareth Seigel became interested in photography in high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana; his senior portfolio took first place at the JEA/NSPA National Journalism Convention. He graduated from Northwestern University with a B.A. in economics, studied street photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and earned a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine. Since 2009, his work has been represented in Los Angeles by the Cohen Gallery, featured in Duncan Miller Gallery’s MyDailyPhotograph.com, and exhibited at various exhibitions, including photo la.
Photographs from the series In Fifty Five Words or Less chronicle found words, messages, and symbolic structures created by frequently anonymous people. My fascination with words began long before I started taking pictures as a teenager in the late Eighties. It wasn’t until after I moved to Los Angeles in 2000 that those passions merged in a series that has grown alongside the Internet and the rise of social media. I’m intrigued by the profound consequences of our interconnectedness, both the benefits as well as the ways in which the mythic powers of social media have been used to monetize and undermine privacy, promulgate hate and extremism, undermine democratic elections, and otherwise sew division and polarize Western societies. The title of this series takes its inspiration from Twitter and the construct of the tweet. From its inception in 2006 until last year, Twitter limited the tweets of its users to 140 characters. Last November, the character limit was doubled to 280. If a Russian research paper that analyzed word lengths using Google Books is to be believed (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1208/1208.6109.pdf), 280 characters works out to around 55 words.
With these images, I’m primarily interested in deconstructing the tweet (and all brief forms of digital communication) in photographs of single words and phrases. The goal is to pair language with a visual context and form, using a visual vocabulary to counter the impoverishing effects of linguistic minimalism. In a rich enough setting, a word can suggest a world or at least afford the opportunity for a constructive dialogue through perspective, humor, irony, mystery, and the ambiguity that is intrinsic to the photographic medium.
CV
Photographs from the series In Fifty Five Words or Less chronicle found words, messages, and symbolic structures created by frequently anonymous people. My fascination with words began long before I started taking pictures as a teenager in the late Eighties. It wasn’t until after I moved to Los Angeles in 2000 that those passions merged in a series that has grown alongside the Internet and the rise of social media. I’m intrigued by the profound consequences of our interconnectedness, both the benefits as well as the ways in which the mythic powers of social media have been used to monetize and undermine privacy, promulgate hate and extremism, undermine democratic elections, and otherwise sew division and polarize Western societies. The title of this series takes its inspiration from Twitter and the construct of the tweet. From its inception in 2006 until last year, Twitter limited the tweets of its users to 140 characters. Last November, the character limit was doubled to 280. If a Russian research paper that analyzed word lengths using Google Books is to be believed (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1208/1208.6109.pdf), 280 characters works out to around 55 words.
With these images, I’m primarily interested in deconstructing the tweet (and all brief forms of digital communication) in photographs of single words and phrases. The goal is to pair language with a visual context and form, using a visual vocabulary to counter the impoverishing effects of linguistic minimalism. In a rich enough setting, a word can suggest a world or at least afford the opportunity for a constructive dialogue through perspective, humor, irony, mystery, and the ambiguity that is intrinsic to the photographic medium.
CV
