Maker/Artist
Siegel, Arthur S.
American photographer, educator, 1913-1978
Siegel began to photograph in Detroit, Michigan, in 1927. From 1935 to 1942, Siegel worked as a freelance magazine and industrial photographer. He also worked for the Farm Security Administration and for the Associated Press Photo Bureau in Detroit, Michigan. In 1937, Siegel produced his first abstract experimental photographs in Detroit. From 1937 to 1938, Siegel studied photography with László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus, now the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. During World War II, Siegel worked as a photographer at the Office of War Information, Washington D.C., and later as the assistant to the Chief of Air Staff Intelligence at the Department of United States Air Corps Aerial Photography, at Chanute Field. From 1946 to 1968, Siegel worked as a freelance photographer in Chicago, and taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago, from 1946 to 1978. At the Institute, Siegel organized the photography department and was a professor of photography from 1949 to 1954, and again from 1965 to 1978, then chair of the department from 1971 to 1978. In 1968, Siegel gave up professional photography in order to teach full-time.
