GREGG SEGAL | Hotel Without a Pool, 2023

Last year, when my brother went off the rails, lost his New York apartment, and wound-up living on the streets, I poured over old family photos, as if I might find signs of his mental illness.  I found I had trouble separating Mark’s life from my own. Our lives were rooted in the same stories going back generations. Steppingstones led to our mother’s estranged father who disappeared when she was six, and who bears a striking resemblance to my brother.

But the old family photos didn’t convey what I’d hoped they might. Few pictures illustrated the stories I recalled from childhood and the lore that had been passed down. I began creating new images, cobbling old photographs together and sketching in the missing pieces, conjuring, shaping, and distilling the past. The pictures, which fall somewhere between photography and painting, imagine what was and what might have been. They distill traits and characteristics of family members and trace the threads that bind us. Excavating these visual meditations has been a means of reckoning with who we are, where we come from, and how we connect across time.

BIO

Gregg Segal studied photography and film at California Institute of the Arts (BFA) dramatic writing at New York University (MFA) and education at The University of Southern California (MA). Segal’s photography has been recognized by American Photography, Communication Arts, PDN, Investigative Reporters and Editors, The New York Press Club, the Society of Publication Designers, Lens Culture, and the Magnum Photography Awards. Segal’s portraiture and photo essays have been featured in Time, GEO, Smithsonian, The Independent, Le Monde, Fortune, National Geographic Adventure and Wired, among others. His first monograph Daily Bread was published by Powerhouse Books in 2019 and a German edition of Daily Bread followed in 2020. An exhibition of Daily Bread curated by Photoville is at The Seaport in New York thru August 2024. Segal’s companion project, 7 Days of Garbage, was published in The Evidence Project: A Book to Protect the Planet.