Black Belt Color: Photographs by Jerry Siegel represents a project that started decades ago.
Born and raised in Selma, Alabama, photographer Jerry Siegel has spent years documenting his hometown and the surrounding area. These images set forth the unique cultural landscape of that area, known as the Black Belt.
The book includes 65 full-color, full-page images of Siegel’s photographs of the Black Belt from the 1990s to the present decade, including seven panoramic fold-outs. It features an essay by William U. Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art; a brief essay by the late Alabama writer Mary Ward Brown (who was a close friend of Siegel’s); and a long interview.
Eiland, a fellow native of the region, writes, “These photographs speak of deep attachment, of reasoned critique, of the vagaries of memory. … He has stories to tell, a time and place to document and plenty of territory to cover in doing so.”