Phil Segal

Various forms of photography have been with us for almost two centuries. While most of the best- known images are realistic, I would argue that, in fact, much of photography is abstract, showing a world that is not real.

In modern digital photos the images are made up of thousands of pixels which don’t differ a lot from pointillist paintings.

Photography is a marriage of technology and art – and it always has been. The photographer chooses his or her subject to emphasize, chooses to use color or black and white, etc. How an image is processed can seriously change its appearance. Over the years we have seen solarized pictures, hand painted pictures and the use of the gum bichromate process to add color. Also, these methods might add brush strokes and layering to mimic some of the elements of painting. Straight forward images of natural objects can appear abstract.

My first experience with photography was in 1961, when as a twelve-year-old when my father took me around New York City for a school photography project. At the time I used an Argus C3 Rangefinder camera and a Weston light meter. He then taught me to develop and print black and white images in a home darkroom. While studying at SUNY Buffalo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I used a Pentax SLR and had access to well-equipped darkrooms. Now I primarily use Canon digital cameras and image processing is out of the darkroom and into the computer, using Adobe Elements, Lightroom, and Photoshop. Over the last six decades the tools have changed, the world has changed, but I still enjoy photographing the world around me and sharing my vision of what I see and what I imagine.

Most of the images in this show are realistic and documentary. Many are from the Lehigh Valley and the surrounding area where my wife and I lived from the 1970s to 2025.

[You can view more of Phil Segal’s work on his Instagram.]