Blair Seitz is an accomplished American photographer and photojournalist. He was awarded a fellowship grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and a silver medal in New York's International Film and TV Festival.[1] The American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, and The World Exhibition of Photography, and the Virginia Museum have exhibited his photographs, as have several smaller galleries, including the one he now helps manage, the Art Plus Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania. His work has also been used to illustrate 21 books and many magazine and newspaper articles and other commercial works, as well as for interior design. He has participated in the Photography for Healing programs at Geisinger Hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania; Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA; and South Jersey Healthcare in Hammonton, NJ. In 2013 RB Books published Seitz's first memoir, highlighting photographs from over ten years of photojournalism in more than twenty countries in Africa, Asia, and Israel/Palestine called Turn the World Around, A Photojournalist Discovers Paths to Peace Traveling a War-torn Planet.
Blair Seitz earned his BS in Sociology in 1967, and also took UVA extension courses in photography from the University of Virginia, in Richmond. Seitz started his career working with UN agencies and Camera Press, London, traveling throughout Africa and Asia to illustrate UN reports and journalistic assignments. Periodicals around the world have carried Seitz' work, including Time, Newsweek, the Guardian, National Geographic Traveler, Nation's Business, New York Times Magazine, and Endless Vacations.[2]
In 1972 Blair Seitz ended up in the field working with Dr. James Merriman, now a professor of anthropology and sociology at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Merriman and Seitz, together with Merriman's wife Nancy, worked together to produce a report for Oxfam and the Mennonite Central Committee in Nairobi titled Camels to Cornfields, a narrated slide-set depicting the process of nomad sedentarization subsequent to drought. They went on to become lifelong friends.
In 1983 Seitz began to focus his photography on Pennsylvania and South Jersey. He and his wife, Ruth Hoover Seitz, co-founded the publishing firm RB Books in 1991. She has written the text for many of their 17 books.
Seitz had an exhibit at the Cowan Gallery of Googleworks Center for the Arts running from September–November, 2013. For February–March, 2014, he exhibited at the Art Association of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In September–October 2015, the Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes University presented the exhibition, Blair Seitz: Aerial Perspectives.
Pennsylvania’s Natural and Cultural Heritage (series)
Insights (series)