Sometimes you don't realize the significance of a place while you're there.
The surrounding fields, cracks in the street, even the people living there — only when you come back home do you begin to see things that lay hidden beneath the surface.
Jerry Siegel points out these particular things, makes them noticeable, through the lens of his camera in a new exhibit at Rebekah Jacob Gallery called Black Belt Panoramas.
These landscapes, spanning Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas, are lonely and quiet. There are small stamps of human life in each picture, signs almost swallowed entirely by acres of rolling land. Man-made structures rest in sharp contrast to large expanses around them.
There's more here than bucolic scenes of rolling hills and green pastures. These are the pictures of everyday life in a small Southern town, a place that people rarely visit and that some are dying to leave. Visitors find it charming when they pass through on their way to someplace else.