State Street, Jewelry Shop

A student and later a faculty member at the Institute of Design, where he taught on and off for three decades, Arthur Siegel was known for photographs that combined avant-garde experimentalism with documentary practice. Beginning in the late 1940s, he worked almost exclusively in color—a highly unconventional choice for the time. In 1951, shortly after undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis, he began the series In Search of Myself, which captured anonymous shoppers on Chicago’s State Street as a means to explore the relationship between identity and consumerism. In this image, Siegel took advantage of the repeated reflections in shop windows to blend shoppers, commodities, and the streets in a dizzying urban bustle.