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Still Life, Street Life
Jean Dykstra
04/01/2004
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Fortunately, Siegel already has a large and enviable collection of
20th-century photography, which was presented in the book One Man’s Eye,
published by Abrams in 2000. “It was never designed to be an investment,” says
Siegel of his collection. “Photography gave me a way to see the world in a more
discriminating way. It was a labor of love. The collection just grew out of my
own intuitive feel for what I liked. I surrounded myself with images that
excited me.” Siegel took photographs himself when he was in the Army and even
studied for a time with Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of
Harper’s Bazaar, as well as émigré photographer Lisette Model, and his tastes
run from masterworks to vernacular imagery.
 | | PENNY PICTURE Display by Walker Evans |
A few years ago, he was looking
through a bin of photographs at Sotheby’s when he found a picture entitled
Circus Freaks by a little-known photographer named Edward Kelty; he bought it
for $200. People scoffed, he says, “But I thought it was one of the most
incredible pictures I’d ever seen.” That discovery led Siegel to build a
collection of Kelty’s photographs of circus performers from the 1920s and ’30s
that was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in 2002 and
collected in the book Step Right This Way: The Photographs of Edward J. Kelty.
Today these photographs might sell for between $1,500 and $3,500, but when
Siegel first began buying them, they were closer to $500. “When I started
searching for these prints, the dealers began to catch on that there was some
value in them,” he recalls.
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