From large scale Polaroids to the latest in digital technology, Sonja Rieger has used her camera to explore the ways in which we perceive the world around us. Rieger began her academic career as a psychology major, quickly changed her mind and focused on visual arts as a sculptor, which led to a career as a photographer and teacher. Rieger has served as an art professor at UAB since 1979.

Her photography began as a way to capture her fleeting sculptural creations made from materials such as large pieces of fabric or turf. But through the years Rieger has embraced the advances seen in the technology of her chosen field—proudly saying she was one of the first people in Birmingham to use a 35 millimeter digital camera.

While Rieger is always juggling several different series of photographic work, there is one project that began when she came to interview for her job at UAB and it continues today. For the interview, she landed at the airport and was immediately taken to the top of Red Mountain where she was enthralled with the view. “It made a big impact,” says Rieger. “I take people up there all the time. I think I took the job because of that. I’m such a visual person.”

A year later, Rieger noted the red neon signs flashing on the kudzu atop the mountain. She began to search out and photograph the red glow all over town and found a similar effect around the city—transmitted from the sign at the airport and the one atop The Club as well as smaller honky-tonk style signs illuminating shotgun houses or billboards. After failed attempts to find the red glow in other cities, Rieger discovered this phenomenon is unique to Birmingham. Through her work in this series Rieger says, “I just felt like I was seeing so much of Birmingham—its culture, how it was built, its history—in these tiny little moments.”

Today, Rieger continues to explore the ways in which we perceive the world around us—the blurring of historical and cultural lines, which she captures in glimpses with her camera. Two recent projects focus on the perceptions of two groups of people: drag show pageant contestants, specifically those in the The Platinum Newcomer Pageant, which Rieger discovered through an employee at the nursing home where her mother resides, and a series on adopted individuals and their biological and non-biological family relationships.

The adoption series, “Thicker Than Water,” was spurred by Rieger’s own life story—she was born in Germany and adopted by her American family. She searched and found her birth-family and says, “As I was finding new family members, my brother, with whom I was raised, died of complications from AIDS. In the midst of this I was told stories by strangers about their family experiences. Since then I have combined the text of the stories with portraits of the subjects.”