Jerry Siegel's Panoramas at Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

Saturday, 12 January 2008 10:59

Montgomery, AL - January 12, 2008 marks the final installment of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art’s Alabama Imagery, a series a photographs focusing on Alabama people, places, and events. The museum has featured Alabama Imagery throughout 2007 in celebration of the Year of Alabama Arts declared by he Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel. The last exhibition of the series will feature Jerry Siegel’s Black Belt Panoramas through March 30.

Jerry Siegel presents a unique vision of rustic relics of Alabama’s Black Belt region, which he captures with a panoramic camera. The panoramic camera creates a unique long and narrow proportion in his images, one that captures the equivalent of two side-by-side cameras. He focuses on the small towns, country stores, diners, and dives in rural Alabama.

Siegel grew up in the 1960s in Selma, but moved to study at the Art Institute of Atlanta after college. Although he became a professional photographer in a prosperous city, Siegel never abandoned his friends and family back home. In fact, Selma is the location of a plethora of his pictures, which feature diners, parlors, porches, gyms, swimming pools, church signs, faded sofas and chairs, and dingy juke joints and honky-tonks. No matter how worn or lonely the items in the pictures may appear, the presence of people is palpable, and his camera always captures a soft, warm light that radiates in all aspects of his photographs.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday Noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free and donations are welcome. For more information, call the MMFA at 334.240.4333 or visit the website at www.mmfa.org .