Interview with Jerry Uelsmann
by Chris Maher and Larry Berman
from bermangraphics.com
Jerry Uelsmann began assembling his photographs from multiple negatives decades before digital tools like Photoshop were available. Using as many as seven enlargers to expose a single print, his darkroom skills allowed him to create evocative images that combined the realism of photography and the fluidity of our dreams. As an artist who is not threatened by digital photography, he is convinced that it is equally difficult to produce great images no matter what tool you use. But for him, “the alchemy of the photographic process” is inextricably tied to his creative vision. A teacher for most of his life, he has helped many photographers push past their limits and challenge their own expectations.
Chris and Larry: When did you begin assembling your images from multiple negatives?
Jerry: It was the late 1950s. I did a little bit then and then it really took hold once I went to Florida in 1960.
I had the benefits of studying with Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University. He had worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago and was open to all kinds of experimentation. He actually made photographs by refracting light through syrup poured on glass.
Chris and Larry: What led you to see the power in collage? At that time, straight photography as done by Edward Weston or Ansel Adams was considered the correct way to do photography.
Jerry: I had become restless with trying to find an image that satisfied me in camera. The idea that the creative gesture in photography was when you clicked the shutter was popular when I was a graduate student. A lot of times I found that if I thought too much about the image, I’d talk myself out of shooting, or I ended up with a lot of images that I thought were okay, but not quite good enough.
When I studied photography at RIT each darkroom had one enlarger. Then when I started teaching we had a group darkroom. I was still using one enlarger, which was labor intensive for multiple printing. One day while I was waiting for some prints to wash, I looked across at the enlargers and thought to myself that if I had the negatives in different enlargers and simply moved the paper, the speed with which I could explore things or line them up would increase a hundred times. That was the moment that changed the way I worked with multiple images.
The other element, which was really a key factor, was that once I began teaching, I ended up being the only photographer in an art department. I was around creative people who were not photographers and who didn’t have their images occur in a fraction of a second.
Once I began exploring some of the options in the darkroom, I had tremendous support from my friends on the arts faculty. But when I went to New York to show people what I was doing they would be excited and say, “it’s very, very interesting, but it’s not photography.”
At the time photography’s highest form was seen in the work of photographers like Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. If you study art history, you’ll see that there was a conscious effort to define the separate mediums. Painting was oil on canvas, and sculpture involved traditional materials like stone, wood or metal. And the photograph was defined as a camera conceived silver gelatin print.
