Photographer Jerry Siegel was born and raised in Selma, Alabama, where, he says, “family and friends were most valued.” He remembers his hometown as vibrant, though small, and in most respects no different from most communities of similar size elsewhere in the South. Even though many things have changed there since his youth—it is no longer the place that he remembers—he claims never to have lost his attachment to and sentiment for Selma and the surrounding countryside. It remains at the core of who he is and what he does and has informed his mature work as one of the South’s leading photographers.

Siegel is a graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta, where he received his degree in 1982. Since the mid-1980s he has worked as a commercial photographer in Atlanta while simultaneously pursuing his own interests as a fine artist. His work has been featured in many group and solo exhibitions over the years. He is represented in the permanent collections of the Columbus Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Telfair Museums, the Morris Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Mobile Museum of Art, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art. His work is also included in private and corporate collections all over America.