www.jerrysiegel.com
Siegel Photography opened in January of 1986. Over the past 35+ years, I have honed my craft while shooting photos of people and products; on location and in the studio. For 15 years I sat on the floor and photographed the Atlanta Hawks as a team photographer. I have traveled across the US shooting for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. All these experiences have influenced me and my work. While continuing my commercial business, in 2004 I was offered a show of my photos of found objects (Damaged). This helped turn my attention to focusing more on personal projects. It has been said that I am “an artist who observes, seeing the ordinary and revealing what makes it special. The things we look right past in our hurried daily routines, Siegel captures through the lens of his camera. Throughout this work, Jerry has sought to photograph what his eyes see and what his heart connects to”. Renown photographer, the late Arnold Newman said about Siegel’s work, “This is how it should be done. This is not only the work of a professional but the work of an artist".
I was awarded the Grand Prize of the first Artadia Award in Atlanta in 2009. Artadia is a New York–based national program that awards artists of outstanding merit with substantial, unrestricted funds and connects them to a network of opportunities.
I was born and raised in Selma, AL, and graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta.
My first monograph, FACING SOUTH, Portraits of Southern Artists was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2011, and features portraits of 100 Southern artists. This body of work has been featured in solo exhibitions at 6 Museums in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana.
My second book, Black Belt Color, focuses my attentions on documenting the unique, cultural landscape of the South, concentrating on the Black Belt region of Alabama.
My work is in many public, private and corporate collections, including the Do Good Fund, High Museum of Art, GA Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, and many more.
In the past 12 years his work has been acquired by 14 museums throughout the Southeastern US. My work has also been shown in solo exhibitions and in the permanent collection at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta, The Telfair Museum, Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, GA, Montgomery Museum of Art in Montgomery, AL, The Morris Museum in Augusta, ­­­­­GA, The Jule Colins Smith Museum in Auburn, AL, and The Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL. A commissioned body of work for the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, was featured in the 2009 solo exhibition Now and Then, Snapshots of the South.