Seth Akgün
photographer & printmaker
Seth Akgün is a photographer and printmaker currently working between Baltimore, New York City, and İstanbul. His work attempts to represent his experiences as a queer person in a multicultural context and the fluctuating definitions of family. Working with traditional practices in analog photography and printmaking, he engages with visual metaphoric language to portray queerness. Akgün’s work involves his body, close friends, family, surroundings, and relationships between them. Reading and research heavily influences him aesthetically and conceptually as he explores what it means to be a queer person in a contemporary context.
Akgün has had work shown in galleries at the Maryland Institute College of Art including the Pinkard Gallery and Wilgus Gallery for a variety of juried group exhibitions. He has worked in freelance photography and graphic design for musicians, artists, and organisations since 2021, and most recently interned at Aperture in Finance & Accounting and Public Programming departments helping install shows, rehousing the limited edition prints archive, developing curricula, and doing invoicing and managing sales data. He is currently pursuing a BFA in Photography and Printmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art and will graduate in 2026.
These images are echoes; they represent being queer in a multicultural context and my exploration of how that manifests physically for me. My work engages with themes of queerness, friendship, and family, as well as how growing up with surroundings that are constantly changing affects all of these relationships and experiences.
Manipulating and printing from analog photographs of my body, my close friends, and my surroundings, I engage with visual metaphoric language to represent these experiences and depict various expressions of queerness. Realising I was queer muddled the life I thought I had ahead of me, but it also explained the confusion and angst in my past that I’d ignored. Growing up and receiving backlash from my family, friends, and the internet as I came out seared shame into my body. I stopped talking about being queer—it made me want to vomit. I still only talk about it to my closest friends.
I spent long hours in the ballet studio growing up—taking my body apart and building it back up over and over again. This repetitive motion of putting myself back together again has translated into my processes in the darkroom and printmaking studios as I make images representing my unstable relationship to my body and identity. Printmaking allows me to fully realise my lifelong attempts to hide and obscure my body, learned from growing up in environments where a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude was pressed into my skin. I work strategically to challenge the limitations of the darkroom and printmaking studios using time-intensive methods to process images. Analog photography is not only a disciplined way of working; it also constitutes the foundation for my printmaking practice, allowing me to disrupt the legibility of my images.
The fragmentation and abstraction of my images creates a metaphor for the way I have always hidden myself away. Engaging with complex printmaking methods speaks to my relationship between my body and my identity. Taking time to slow down with medium and large format analog photography and printing in the darkroom, and then pulling prints through silk screens and off of gently hand-wiped copper plates has been an integral part of healing this complex relationship. The physicality of handling my body through printmaking has also pushed me to think about strategies to evolve off of the flat walls of my studio and physically embody the vastness and abstract qualities of the feelings I make work about, and I am exploring more sculptural processes this semester as I find ways to take my body apart and build it back up in a new way.