Read My T-Shirt Logo About the Author

Getting to [Read My T-Shirt] for President... a true history of the
political front and back and the Citizen Warriors

Who is Judy Seigel? (Finale)

Before Photography:
As art students of the 1950s, we were much too sophisticated for art magazines – not counting the occasional furtive glance at Art News. But the only "art news" there seemed to be Abstract Expressionism as reviewed by poets yearning to save the world through brush strokes.

That didn't strike me as doable, so when it came time to choose a major, I chose "graphic art," Being what we called "a good drawer," I was soon earning what we also called "good money for a woman" in advertising illustration, with work chosen for Society of Illustrators, Graphis, and Art Directors Annuals, among other venues. But I hated carrying out other people's stupid ideas, every job was a 3-day migraine, and I vowed to unhook my art from my livelihood as soon as possible. And, after much juggling, I managed to do that, becoming at last a happy painter.

Then El inner process junky awoke and plunged me into acrylics, where processes invented themselves. I called them Organic Geometry (yes, before "Neo Geo"), in an idyl I never imagined would be, when the call came, pre-empted by photography.

Writing:
In the 1970s I began writing for artists' and women's publications, and was co-founder of Women Artists News (WAN), a pioneer in the field. In 1975, "art-talk fever" struck, as hundreds of panel discussions, radiating out from New York, became the focus of American art life. WAN both participated and reported without fear or favor. Finally I edited Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk that Changed Art, 1975-1990 [Midmarch],
The Citizen Warriors
Today, my formerly sordid portraits of Times Square are exotic, almost lovable, in part because those scenes are gone. Yet the recent portraits in "Read My T-Shirt" are arguably even more exotic: first, because they emerged on their own from the culture, rather than from paint or deliberate magic, second and more amazing, because somehow they remained invisible and ignored by most mainstream media, despite their numbers and their passion. What Preston called "the immediacy of the photographic image" intensifies the urgent messages these citizens proclaim front and back.

Darkroom Magazine [Nov. '84] quoted my statement that "I consider the unpredictable outlines created by solzarization to be the modern equivalent of the exquisite outlines in antique Persian miniatures." True. But the flow, movement and expression of live people is exquisite to begin with, and even more compelling. These T-shirts present the urgent issues of our day. The folks wearing them are citizen warriors.
an anthology of 253 of those art-talk events, which became text and resource for college and graduate level courses in Contemporary Criticism and Women's Studies. Here "art talk" left the slough of academic abstraction as ardent speech, often deliciously anecdotal, even "dish-y." Professors reported that their students not only read Mutiny, they loved it. Still, my most ardent personal focus remained on painting (my own).

Photography:
As described in the Introduction to "Read My T-Shirt," this enchanting new "street literature" called me until I answered. After documenting the T-shirts of 1978, I branched out, photographing wherever I wandered, whatever caught my eye. By the mid-1980s, I'd sold a photograph to the Museum of Modern Art (John Szarkowski asked me how I'd done it, promising he wouldn't tell), had a solo show at Marcuse Pfeiffer Gallery, sold work to private and public collections, been featured in most contemporary American photo magazines and begun a 14-year stint teaching Non-Silver Photography at Pratt Institute, also speaking and teaching at the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, and Parsons/ New School, et al. (As far as I know, my ICP workshops in Gum Bichromate were the first "gum only" workshops in the country.)

In 1998, on the theory that I might manage to keep track of my dozens of class worksheets if they were bound on numbered pages, I founded and for six years published and edited The World Journal of Post-Factory Photography. The range of Post-Factory's opinion, criticism, commentary, history, and first-person testimony fulfilled its masthead promise of "How-2 and Y," and (ultimately with subscribers in 32 countries) P-F was listed as "must have" in most resources of the field.

The completed "Volume" of P-F's nine issues is still in print (or reprint), with recent orders from France, the Slovak Republic, Australia, Japan and Canada, as well as the US. (9 issues postpaid to US: $42. info@post-factory.org.)

Personal work:
My first successes in photography were in a process of my own devising: solarized silver gelatin prints re-exposed through the negative, then toned in iridescent colors, often with painted figures in the manner of Persian miniatures. The seemingly endless possibilities of formulas, combinations, and experiments fed my inner process junky, until... until the day arrived when I felt I'd plumbed the possibilities of "factory" materials and decamped for "non-silver" (ie, the hand-coated processes of the 19th century, some of which do actually contain silver).

The most feared and awesome process then being resurrected was Gum Bichromate; I was apparently the first person to apply modern sensitometric tests to the process (or the first to mention it), which disproved hallowed "principles" and practices still being cut-and-pasted, untested, into new books from old. These findings were greeted with indignation, but did ultimately prevail.

Subjects:
While I was solarizing, toning and/or painting on almost everything, my photographs were increasingly anchored to New York City. One show, "Metal and Paint," was reviewed in Newsday [June 22 '85] by Malcolm Preston, who said, "Seigel has the best of two worlds. There is the immediacy of the photographic image and the sensuousness of the painterly-like surface.... unusual prints. See them !" The subjects were New York skyline and cemetery scenes.

Overall, these photographs and their processes were reviewed or featured in, among others, Popular Photography, Modern Photography, Art News, Darkroom Photography, and Journal of the Society of Contemporary Photography. The first was probably Andy Grundberg's Oct. 31, 1982, NY Times review of 'Photo Start," a group show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which used my solarized, toned and painted print "F-64 Man, Sa-di Observer" as announcement.

Then, in September 1985, I lost it — the romance that is — falling instead for pre-Disney Times Square. Big Apple Wrecking was in charge, clearing ground for huge high rises, standard store fronts, mall-style chains, and crowds thick as peanut butter. But for a long final moment, every line of sight gave the camera something exotic, sordid, vulgar, picturesque, repulsive, lurid, funky, kitschy, quaint, shocking or, at the very least, illegal, like a drug sale, $10 bill in plain sight. The Funny Store, Art Paradise, Fantasy Land, Spectacolor, Black Israelites in "biblical" garb enraging out-of-towners by claiming to be the real Jews, even an old Howard Johnson hanging in for last licks – all of it refulgent in decay, then gone.

Several of my Times Square prints (the fellow peeing into an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken at the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue, for instance) were purchased for the New York Public Library collection. Then I began printing those scenes of vintage squalor and romance in magical Gum Bichromate (published in Lyle Rexer's Antiquarian Avant Garde [Abrams] and Christopher James's Handbook of Alternative Photographic Processes [Delmar], but many more await their translation.

My 1995 lecture at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio was titled "The New York Art Scene Now (what is Art? Where is Dean and Deluca?"). A lecture about my own work at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2005, was titled "Confessions of a Crooked Photographer." Now I confess that for the last two years I forgot Dean and Deluca and "art scene now," consumed by writing and design of "[Read My T-shirt] for President... A true history of the political front and back."

For details of how I accidentally wrote and photographed a book about Citizen Warriors, see introduction and prologue, also Part Two of "Read My T-shirt."

Judy Seigel

[back to top]