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Eric Seidner

@eseidner

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Live in Shanghai
Published on Nat Geo, former YS member
Curator @ourfotoworld
Member of @raw_community … raw_VIP_GOLD

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A deity walks out of the smoke — and the utility wires above the street stay in the frame.

In “Faith, Flares, Fortune,” a Youshen deity advances through a village temple parade in Fujian while villagers raise hand flares from both sides. Their arms create a series of diagonals leading to the painted face, and Eric keeps the ordinary homes and wires visible behind the ritual, so the photograph never drifts into something detached from the village that produces it.

“So I set up my frame and waited a long while for the kind of human interaction that felt right.”

Eric Seidner — Honorable Mentions in Travel, Street and Drone at the Global Lens Photography Awards 2025, for “Faith, Flares, Fortune,” “The Floating Village” and “Following To The End Of The Rainbow.”

Read the full conversation:
https://globallensawards.com/interview/2025/eric-seidner/

@eseidner

#GlobalLensAwards #GLPA2025 #PhotographyAwards #InConversation #ArtistInterview #PhotographyInterview #StreetPhotography #DronePhotography by @eseidner

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2 months ago

So happy to share that my photo “Writ In Water” is a Finalist in the 2025 Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest in the “Drone / Aerial” category ✨ — this is my second time as finalist in this category and with a China photo.
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Over 17,000 images submitted from around the world this year, so being part of this group is really an honor.
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You can see all the finalists on the Smithsonian site and vote for Reader’s Choice (once a day until March 30).

#smithsonian #chinatravel #photocontest by @eseidner

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6 months ago

This one means a lot. My photo “Faith. Flares. Fortune.” has been awarded a Particular Merit Mention in the All About Photo Awards 2026 @allaboutphotocom , judged by the legendary Steve McCurry @stevemccurryofficial — someone whose work has inspired mine for years. Truly humbling. 🙏

#chinatravel
#allaboutphotocom
#aap
#stevemccurry
#allaboutphotoawards by @eseidner

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5 months ago

Look closely. Not one of these moons is glowing on its own. Someone’s standing underneath it, in the dark, holding it up.
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I’ve built things like that more than once — took them from nothing, got them into the spotlight, and then handed them off, on purpose or not, to whoever was standing there when the lights came up.
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For a while I thought that should bother me more than it does.
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It doesn’t. There’s a version of ambition that needs your name attached to everything you touch, and I used to think that was the only kind. It’s not. There’s a quieter kind that strives just to see the thing come into existence — to be real, to be standing, to be impactful.
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The hand seldom gets the spotlight.
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But it hears the applause too, even from the dark. It never worked to be seen. It worked so the thing would exist.

#nightphotography #fi̇neartphotography #zhejiang #surreal #lightart taken in Hangzhou, China by @eseidner

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8 days ago

For a while now I’ve said “once things calm down.”
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Once work eases. Once I’m surer. Once the timing is right. Once the storm passes. It sounds like patience. Mostly it’s a way of never deciding.
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Nothing I’m glad I did started in calm. It started while I was unsure and a little out of my depth. Feeling ready came afterward, if it came at all.
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Growth is just what we call it later. In the moment it’s a decision, usually a small one, made while the weather is still bad. The good ones all looked like this: unsettled, unflattering, uneasy.
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So what’s yours? The call you haven’t made, the move, the “yes” you keep rehearsing?
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The weather was never going to clear on my schedule. The forecast still says cloudy with a chance of rain.

#udaipur #rajasthan #goldenhour #moodygrams #beforethestorm taken in Udaipur, Rajasthan by @eseidner

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15 days ago

It’s been a year of turbulence — the kind that discomforts and reshapes you whether you’re ready or not. But somewhere between noise and uncertainty, a little light is starting to show. Until then, I’ll take my moment of zen wherever I can find it. Here, a lone devotee sits in perfect stillness beneath a 33-metre reclining Buddha at Wat Chayamangkalaram in Penang. Slowing it down. Reflecting. Breath. He had the right idea.

#WatChayamangkalaram #Penang #travelphotography #buddhism #documentaryphotography taken in Penang, Malaysia by @eseidner

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a month ago

All the world’s a stage — Shakespeare knew something we keep relearning. If that’s true, then what is authenticity, really? Are we ever fully ourselves, or are we always performing some version of who we think we should be — for family, for colleagues, for strangers on the street?

Paradoxically, the most structured performances sometimes carry the most honest emotion. Opera singers train for decades to express grief, joy, longing — feelings we spend our whole lives trying to articulate and usually can’t. Practiced rehearsal connects to authenticity. Why else would we cry at the movies?

But even stage plays have moments where a performer breathes something unexpected into a familiar line. A pause held a beat too long. A gesture slightly off the choreography.

A play has its script and its stage directions. Life hands you the same. Going off script is risky, daring, vulnerable — it means removing the mask and the makeup, standing in the light as whatever you actually are. Does the audience come to see something real, or a skillful imitation of it? There’s only one way to find out. Improvise.

#Songyang #ChineseOpera #documentaryphotography #chinatravel #zhejiang taken in SongYang, Zhejiang by @eseidner

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2 months ago

We say we want different.
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We commission the bold idea, invite the unconventional thinker, ask for the perspective that flips everything upside down. We float words like ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ in strategy meetings.
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Then someone actually does it — turns the world on its head, shows you the city from the sky, makes you see what you’ve been walking past your whole career — and something unexpected happens.
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Discomfort. Resistance. “That’s not how we do things here.”
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The trickiest leadership trap isn’t the fear of failure. It’s the gap between what we say we want and what we can actually tolerate when we meet it face to face. We want innovation in the abstract. We want difference…at a safe distance. But genuine new thinking doesn’t always arrive neatly packaged — it often arrives disorienting, unfamiliar, slightly vertiginous.
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The question worth sitting with: are you building a culture that truly rewards the person brave enough to show you the upside-down view? Or are you rewarding the person who makes the status quo feel slightly fresher?
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Because the city looks remarkable from this angle. //
The question is whether you’re willing to stand in it.

#shanghai #shanghaibund #lujiazui #streetphotography taken in The Bund,shanghai by @eseidner

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4 months ago

From the ground, the tea fields would feel endless — walls of green rising and folding in on themselves, each turn like a choice, each row like a corridor. When you’re inside it, life can feel the same. The path ahead bends. The way forward disappears. You move step by step, unable to see where it all leads.
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But sometimes the problem isn’t the path — it’s the vantage point.
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From above, what looked like a maze reveals its design. The curves become patterns. The detours make sense. The road, lined with spring blossoms, cuts clearly through the landscape. What felt confusing becomes coherent. What felt random reveals intention.
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We often try to solve life at eye level, pushing harder through the rows, focusing on the next immediate turn. Yet clarity rarely comes from moving faster inside the maze. It comes from rising above it — pulling back, gaining distance, allowing perspective to redraw the map.
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You can’t see the forest for the trees when you are standing among them. But when you lift yourself — even briefly — the forest arranges itself into shape. The path is there. It always was.
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Sometimes the way forward isn’t about forcing your way through.
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It’s about climbing high enough to see it. by @eseidner

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7 months ago

This hallway doesn’t want you to relax. Every wall is layered in other people’s noise — names, warnings, half-finished thoughts scratched over each other until nothing underneath is legible anymore. And there, closer than comfortable, is someone else in the frame, walking my direction, under a sign that might mean exit.
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That’s the feeling of being stuck in transition, lately. Not a walk toward clarity — just turbulence.
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People keep telling me this shot looks like the Backrooms movie. They’re right, and that’s the point — a space that should be ordinary (a hallway, a bar, a way through) but isn’t quite. An architectural uncanny valley. The archways don’t lead anywhere new, they just repeat. The floor tilts toward a light that keeps its distance. Progress just leads to more intersections. And you’re never actually alone in it.
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Would I want to walk it? Honestly, no. But transitions don’t offer a preview before you’re already three archways in, boxed by noise on every side, someone else’s pace forcing yours.
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It’s loud, it’s close, it’s a little too much like getting lost somewhere that has no map. But, I’m just still moving. That’s the only plan I’ve got right now. Hopefully, there is a light at the end of the….

#liminalspace #streetphotography #shanghai #bar taken in Shanghai,china by @eseidner

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2 months ago

Transcendence — ICM and slow shutter reveal what meditation may feel like from the inside.

#icm #icmphotography #monks #meditation #china taken in Hangzhou, China by @eseidner

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2 months ago

Consider the wood in this photo. It doesn’t just frame the path — it leans in, twists, narrows toward a single point, like hundreds of hands slowly closing and twisting around something they’re trying to choke.
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That’s what my mind has felt like lately.
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Down there on the concrete is a single thought, trying to travel unimpeded from one end of me to the other and actually arrive somewhere — an idea, a decision, a feeling. But the wood keeps twisting inward. Notifications — (constricting) — work pressure — (constricting) — the itch for distraction that never quite says what it wants, only that it wants. Each one wraps a little tighter, like a hand wringing a towel, until the thought that started clear arrives at the other end wrung out, diluted, half itself.
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It’s not loud. It’s not panic, this kind of constriction. It’s just slow narrowing — a clogged artery, not yet a heart attack. I don’t notice the walls closing in until I realize how long it’s been since a single thought made it through whole.
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So lately I’m doing the unglamorous thing: fewer screens, more walking, more silence I don’t immediately fill. Not to escape the tunnel — just to widen it again.
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Let the thought through. That’s all I’m asking of myself this season.

#ArchitecturalPhotography #chinatravel #travelphotography #Mindfulness #FocusOverNoise taken in SongYang, Zhejiang by @eseidner

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3 months ago