Art Fx #24: “Family with Branches” by Elizabeth Siegfried

Art Fx is a year-long series on Huntsville Doppler featuring Huntsville-area visual artists.

“Family with Branches” by Elizabeth Siegfried measures 18.5” x 23.5”. It is an image from the body of work called Life After Life, an exhibition about her profound attachment to the ancestral summer home that was built by her great-grandparents in 1902 in Ontario.

“It is about the visceral connection to my ancestral ties; nature as an integral part of connection to place; the attachments to the objects and structures that create a bridge between the past and the present; and the sadness of impermanence, transience and the passage of time,” she says.

“Family with Branches” is a vintage portrait of Siegfried’s great-grandparents with their five children, one of whom is her maternal grandmother (the standing woman on the left). Layered on top of the portrait is a photograph of offshoots from a tree that presently grows on the ancestral property. This overlay, printed on mylar so the viewer can see both images simultaneously, connects the present with the past and also metaphorically keeps the ancestors protected.

“My photographs are about the inevitable unfolding of time,” says Siegfried. “With references to place and spiritual and generational legacy, the work invites the viewer to look deeply and find resonance with images that seem to exist simultaneously in the past and present. Always there is evidence of beauty with a tinge of sadness and the qualities of impermanence and imperfection.”

“Family with Branches” is an edition of 10 and is for sale for $1,500. The size is 18.5” x 23.5” unframed.

About the artist:

Elizabeth Siegfried, born in Baltimore Maryland, has lived and worked in Canada for nearly thirty years. She has a BA in English from Skidmore College (1977) and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Maine Media College (2019).

Siegfried is known for her portraiture, meditative landscapes, and strong narratives. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Mexico. She taught platinum printing for 12 years at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography in Toronto and has received numerous awards in the U.S. and Canada. Her photographs have been reproduced and discussed in such publications as Black & White Magazine, Photo Ed Magazine, SHOTS magazine, and Camera Arts. In 2017 the CBC aired a video on her multi-generational collaboration called CIRCUS! Her first book, LifeLines, was published in 2000.

Siegfried’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts in Japan, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography housed in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Peter E. Palmquest Women in Photography International Archive held at the Beinicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

She presently works with digital capture and explores the expression of color but has not lost her love of historical processes and analogue photography. She spends half the year in Canada and half the year in Sarasota, Florida.

Life After Life and additional work by Elizabeth Siegfried can be found on elizabethsiegfried.com, or connect with her on Facebook here or Instagram @elizabeth_siegfried_photo.

See more local art in Doppler’s Art Fx series here.

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