Photographer: Jerry N. Uelsmann

What a photographer! This is a guy who since the late 20th century has been at the forefront of turning photographer into the highest form of art. The integration of the real and the surreal in his work is unique. You know a Uelsmann when you see one because he seamlessly grafts composite images in black and white. His photographs combine several negatives to create surreal landscapes that interweave images of trees, rocks, water and human figures in new and unexpected ways.

Jerry Norman Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan, US, on June 11, 1934, the second son of an independent grocer. He attended public schools and was never a particularly diligent student. During his high school years he became interested in photography as a serious vocation. Uelsmann enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1953, received his B.F.A. in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. from Indiana University in 1960. He taught at the University of Florida from 1960 until recently, and held the position of Graduate Research Professor at UF since 1974. Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a founding member of the American Society for Photographic Education, a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and has served as a trustee of the Friends of Photography.

Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums worldwide including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Biblioteque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, and the National Gallery of Australia.

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WS: uelsmann.net

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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.

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