b. North Andover, Massachusetts
2006 BFA Studio Art, Massachusetts College of Art
2012 MFA with Honours in Photography Stanford University
Lives and works in Northern California

These images reference subjects both elemental and deeply familiar: fire, land, the night sky, the empty room. Through use of minimal, subtractive form the viewer is invited to compose the remainder of the image themselves. In this way our experience of the work becomes at once universal and deeply personal – an exploration of the line between physical space and our psychological relationship to it. Whether an image emerges slowly from the dark or is dominated by light, these photographs convey a sense of place where past, present and future are collapsed into a single state of time. In this way, spaces of personal, shared or historical significance are transformed into places of spiritual significance. Something both intimate and sublime operates within these images, transporting us to a place outside of place, a time independent of time. This feeling of eeriness, of otherness speaks to a truth hidden behind everyday observation – a sense that what colours our experience is not merely a landscape, a room, a night sky but something greater; something more.<.i>
– Adam Katseff

Adam Katseff brings the viewer into a new relationship with the familiar. Working in the with large format film, the artist’s paired down minimal aesthetic enables him to capture the essence of an object or a feeling for a place. His photographs of landscapes are taken in the evening. The expansive scenery is saturated in the inky blackness of the night sky. It is as if we are seeing the memory of a landscape: semi-obscured by time and darkness. His works have a surreal dream-like quality, wherein the recognisable is made unrecognisable. In the artist’s series entitled Flame, he captures the movement and energy of fire. The exposures for this series vary from 30 seconds to almost an hour. Each flare and blaze appears powerful and otherworldly: rendering the elemental beautiful.

Katseff’s work has exhibited at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; The Lab, San Francisco; Root Division, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, and the Michael and Noemi Neidorff Gallery at Trinity University, San Antonio. The artist is also the recipient of the Anita Squires Fowler Award (2012), Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Fellowship in Fine Art Award (2011) and the Excellence in Photography Award from the Massachusetts College of Art (2005)