In 2012 Serge escaped his lifelong home in New York City and arrived in Tucson—the heart of the Sonoran Desert. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the sharp spines and venomous fangs of desert flora and fauna were a familiar surrogate for New York attitudes.
Serge earned his MFA with distinctions from the University of Arizona and a BA in sociology from Vassar College. He has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Galerie Friedrichshain (Berlin), The Phoenix Museum of Art and The Leica Gallery among many other international exhibitions.
In 2023 Serge’s work will be a part of “The Shape of Time” at the Ucross Art Gallery, curated by Keith F. Davis. In 2022 he showed at The Vision Gallery in Phoenix and the Lishui Museum in China. In 2021 he received a Creosote Grant from the Arts Council in Tucson. In 2020 Serge was a Critical Mass finalist and he was selected to participate in “The Arizona Biennial” at The Tucson Museum of Art. In 2020 he received an “Opportunity Grant” from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. In 2015 he won Special Recognition from the Lange/Taylor Prize out of Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
Serge’s photography has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Life, The London Sunday Times Magazine among many others. Serge’s photographs are part of “Wild Visions: Wilderness as Image and Idea” published by Yale University Press (2022) and authored by Mark Klett, Ben Minteer, et al. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and The Museum of the City of New York.
Serge has taught at the International Center of Photography (NYC), the University of Arizona, Tohono O’odham Community College and Pima Community College.
Serge lives in Tucson and works as a consultant and reviewer for LensCulture Inc. Additionally he has a consulting business catering to photographers. When not at his desk, he can be found backpacking and photographing somewhere deep in the desert wilderness.
Serge J-F. Levy