The Sum of Us
Photographer Gregg Segal combines abstract images of textures found in the streets with old family photos to create multi-layered images trying to understand his complex family history. What initially started as a way to understand his brother’s mental health issues quickly developed into something much deeper and more meaningful.
Photography Gregg Segal 
Mark with seagull
Last year, when my brother went off the rails, lost his New York apartment, and wound-up living on the street, I found myself pouring over old family photos, as if I might find early signs of his mental illness there. Maybe I thought the pictures would trigger buried memories and lead to a deeper understanding of him.
But the old photographs didn’t evoke what I’d hoped they would. They needed something more to express what I felt. Around this time, I’d been shooting abstract images of surfaces I found on the street, something like the urban abstractions that Aaron Siskind made in the 40’s and 50’s. There was a power, an emotion even, in my close-ups of peeling posters, squashed greasy paper bags, crazed scrawl on soaped glass, grime caked on dripped paint, jagged scars of text. Though abstract, this visceral messiness said something to me about impermanence and the mutability of time.
Dad holding Mark
Joyful Mark
Puppet master
Shell-shocked
Mom with three of her future husbands
Punching Mark
Without quite understanding what I was doing, I began layering my street abstractions with family photos, some old and some recent. I inhabited the settings of family photos with these visceral textures. They became part of the environment. They settled into our clothes and streaked across our skin and hair, a patina of time, a metaphor for mortality.
“Last year, when my brother went off the rails, lost his New York apartment, and wound-up living on the street, I found myself pouring over old family photos, as if I might find early signs of his mental illness there.”
As memory and emotion were mashed with imagination, stories took shape and the project spread beyond my brother. Enfolding the family, it traced identity across generations back to my mother’s estranged father who disappeared when she was a child and started a new family in a distant town. This man I never met appears dimly outlined in layers beneath my brother, their faces overlapping as they become one another. My grandfather’s ripples project out to my mother’s fear of abandonment, and to my own bumpy, disjointed childhood which I observed from a distance with glazed eyes and an open mouth. In The Sum of Us, time isn’t linear. It’s experienced in co-existing layers.
Artist Tala Madani describes her work as being “excavated from her psyche” which resonates with me and my process. Creating these visual meditations is a means of reckoning with who we are, where we come from, and how we connect across time.
Mom with two faces
Hate you, love me
Mark grown up
Mom/Mark Halloween
Mark on the street
About Gregg
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. He is the recipient of the 2018 Food Sustainability Media Award. 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. Daily Bread is part of a permanent installation curated by Photoville at The T Building in Queens, New York and is being shown at The Dom Museum, Vienna as part of their exhibition The Meal thru August.
To see more of his work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram
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