Arthur Siegel
Born, Detroit, MI, 2 August, 1913; Died, Chicago, IL, 1 February, 1978).
American photographer and educator. Siegel is known for a vast body of black-and-white and color photographs that include documentary images as well as creative experiments (e.g. photograms). His importance as an educator was in integrating photography into a four-year university-level curriculum and in establishing photography as a field in graduate study. An avid collector of vintage photographs, Siegel integrated insights from his vast knowledge of photographic history into his studio classes. At a time when the importance of Chicago’s architectural heritage was still little understood, he and his colleagues and students at the Institute of Design in Chicago documented this heritage in a vast body of skillful and sensitive photographs; one result of this effort was a book edited by Siegel, Chicago’s Famous Buildings, first published in 1965.
Siegel graduated from Wayne State University in 1936 with a degree in sociology; by that time he had begun his career as a photographer, and following graduation he taught photography as a part-time instructor at Wayne State. His early work included portraits as well as photographs sold to newspapers and newswire services, including New York Times/Wide World Picture Service.
In the spring of 1938 Siegel studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, a precursor of the Institute of Design, where he began teaching in 1946. Highlights of his early work include a series of riveting photographs, Right of Assembly, documenting rallies of workers during a strike at Chrysler in 1939. At about this time he began a long career as a magazine photographer for Life and other publications. In 1941 he began working on assignments for the United States Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, and after entering the army in 1943 he made photographs of military life.
At the Institute of Design Siegel aided the school’s director and master photographer László Moholy-Nagy in setting up a four-year photographic curriculum. To draw attention to it, in the summer of 1946 the two presented an intensive six-week summer symposium featuring visiting photographers, including Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott and Beaumont Newhall. Siegel taught at the Institute of Design on and off for the rest of his life. Among his colleagues there were Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. The Institute of Design became a unit of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949, and the first graduate degrees were awarded in 1952. Siegel also taught briefly at Harvard University, at the University of Illinois in Chicago and elsewhere.
