Eric Zeigler received his BFA from Bowling Green State University and MFA from
San Francisco Art Institute. Zeigler uses film and digital processes to create his
images. His work has been shown in solo and national juried shows across the
country, and he currently teaches Photography and New Media at the University of
Toledo.
Still Photographs
“Eric Zeigler is motivated by surprises. When he goes out to make photographs, he
starts with few set conditions for what to will encounter. Remaining open to
everything is paramount to his process. Zeigler photographs many things and often,
and then sorts through that work to find the interesting pictures. The work is then
sifted—sometimes dozens of times—until themes emerge and then he can see what
he was after the whole time. With Still Photographs, Zeigler photographed memories,
death, and humor. Not easy subjects to sit near each other. He found them
inseparable however, and the results filled with enormous tensions—tensions
describing the humor we must have to participate in world that we exist in.
The photographic documentary genre has proved to be a limited medium for
describing the entirety of real life, contrary to its historical claims. By combining
documentary style photographs together in diptychs, Zeigler is able to show
tensions that would be otherwise unphotographable. Photography relies on subjects
to be in a single frame with relations to one another, but the tensions he depicts are
strung through the space between meanings of the individual photographs.
Eric Zeigler created combinations to reinforce the unknown in the pictures. When
we are shown one photograph alone, it is much easier to let that photograph’s
assumptions dictate the meaning. But when we are living in the world, we do not
always see individual events as separated from everything else. Our emotions,
thoughts, and memories of events are formed and changed as the result of other
information asking for our attention at the same time. These diptychs are his way
of reinforcing the range of possibility and surprising interaction that exists in the
world is also possible in a documentary style photograph.”
To view more of Eric’s work please visit his website.