Arthur Siegel American, 1913-1978

Arthur Siegel (1913–1978) was a pioneer of experimental color photography and one of the most consequential teachers the medium had in America. Working at the intersection of photojournalism and abstraction, he used color and variations in tone to convey emotional states rather than simply describe the world around him. He also helped build the photography program at the Institute of Design in Chicago into the most comprehensive of its kind in the country.

Born in Detroit, Siegel was photographing by the mid-1920s and received a degree in sociology from Wayne State University in 1937, by which time he already had a decade of photographic experience. That year, László Moholy-Nagy reviewed his portfolio while lecturing in Detroit and offered him a scholarship to the New Bauhaus. Siegel enrolled in György Kepes’s first class there in 1938. He made his first abstract experimental photographs in Detroit the year before.

Siegel returned to Detroit as a photojournalist, working for The New York Times and freelancing for Life, Fortune, and Collier’s. During the war, he also photographed for the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and the Army Air Corps. In 1946, Moholy-Nagy invited him back to the school, by then the Institute of Design, to organize the photography department and develop a four-year college program with Harry Callahan. In the final year of Moholy-Nagy’s life, Siegel assisted him in processing photograms; Siegel’s own photograms from this period depict moving forms advancing and receding through an unbounded space.

Beginning in 1951, Siegel worked seriously in color, progressively abstracting the subject until color itself became the carrier of the image. That same year, he suffered a nervous breakdown and entered Freudian analysis. At his analyst’s urging, he turned the camera toward the question of his own identity. The resulting series, In Search of Myself, was photographed along Chicago’s State Street using multiple exposures and reflections in storefront windows to layer taxis, pedestrians, neon, architecture, and Siegel’s own faint image into shifting compositions. The city dissolves into color and form, becoming a vehicle for psychological inquiry in which the photographer is present but never fully defined.

Siegel printed the series using the dye-transfer process, a laborious and prohibitively expensive technique rarely employed for personal work. In 1951, a single print could cost approximately $250 to produce, at a time when even a well-paid freelance photographer might earn $6,000 to $8,000 a year. Siegel undertook the work while unemployed and in analysis, and the expense came close to ruining him financially. The extraordinary cost of the project helps explain both the intensity of the series and the scarcity of surviving prints.

The Art Institute of Chicago gave Siegel a one-person exhibition in the autumn of 1952, its first exhibition devoted entirely to color photographs made in dye transfer. A second all-color solo exhibition followed, and Edward Steichen included Siegel’s work in Image of America at The Museum of Modern Art. He left the Institute of Design in 1955 to return to photojournalism and commercial work, edited Chicago’s Famous Buildings in 1965, and continued to write extensively about photography.