Photography pioneer bends reality without digital tools

February 02, 2013|By Steve Siegel, Special to The Morning Call

A tree with a full canopy of branches, its roots dangling below, hovers like an alien life form over an island that itself hovers over a placid lake. A pair of cupped hands reverently cradles a rippling pond. A menacing asteroid floats in the sky over the head of a young woman dozing in an open field.

Long before Photoshop allowed image makers to bend reality with a single keystroke, photographer Jerry Uelsmann was doing it the hard way. For more than half a century, Uelsmann has pushed the creative and technical boundaries of photography, creating surreal, dreamlike images not with digital shortcuts, but with the alchemy of light and film, seamlessly melding images from multiple negatives in the darkroom.

"The Mind's Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann," on view at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, is the first major retrospective of Uelsmann's work in more than 40 years.

More than 100 mostly black and white images in the exhibit include not only some of Uelsmann's most famous photographs, but also much of his earlier work, including single-negative prints, prints on fabric and stone and images never exhibited before.

The exhibit is drawn from last year's Uelsmann retrospective organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., by Phillip Prodger, Peabody's curator of photography. It is the first exhibit of Uelsmann's work in Pennsylvania since the photographer's mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970.

Born in Detroit in 1934, Uelsmann had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967. His work has been exhibited in more than 100 shows in the United States and overseas. A recipient of both a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Uelsmann is retired from the University of Florida, where he taught since 1960. He lives in Gainsville.

Uelsmann pioneered the art of multi-layered imagery years ahead of anyone else, and years ahead of digital tools such as Photoshop. But Photoshop, like the darkroom itself, with all its enlargers and safelights and chemicals, is a mere tool.

Being able to merge, mirror and multiply images is only the mechanical aspect of the craft. Uelsmann's true art lies in his ability to create images we know are impossible, yet somehow look absolutely right. His are photographs of not what we see, but what we feel.

"What is real and what is true in photography — that's one of the main themes in the show," Prodger says.

"Jerry started working at the time of what we call 'straight photography.' You saw something that existed in the world, and you photographed it. But Jerry started with a whole different idea. He felt there was no reason why reality can't also encompass our emotions. You do that by finding things and synthesizing a picture out of raw materials, and never accepting that what the natural world gives you is the only truth."

Many of Uelsmann's images are so seamlessly crafted, so natural-looking, that our concept of reality becomes blurred. His iconic 1982 photo of a dilapidated, two-story building growing out of a massive gnarled tree trunk looks impossibly probable. And who among us has not had a dream as vivid and startling as his image of a rowboat hovering terrifyingly close to the base of a torrential waterfall?

The exhibit was organized by Michener director and CEO Lisa Tremper Hanover, who drew inspiration from the original installation at the Peabody. It is arranged not in chronological order, but by themes, with sections such as "Relationships," "Self" and "Home."

One of the first images visitors see is a huge color panorama of the interior of Uelsmann's home darkroom, showing a row of seven enlargers and racks of chemicals, trays and negative carriers.

"Jerry would combine multiple negatives into a single print by a sequence of enlargers set up like a production line. He would have a separate negative in each, and sequentially move the easel holding the paper from one to another," Prodger says. "It was a very hands-on, manual process, always resulting in small differences between prints. Each is unique." Prodger claims the prints in the show, many culled from Uelsmann's own collection, represent the best examples obtainable.

Uelsmann's earliest work, done while he was a graduate student at Indiana University in the late 1950s, and subsequent work from the 1960s at the University of Florida at Gainsville, comes as a surprise.

Not only is most of it "straight photography" created by single negatives, but it's also surprisingly good. Many of these images are being exhibited for the first time.

A photo of a girl with a cat from 1958 shows a keen sense of composition, with the stripes on the cat's fur echoing those on the girl's shirt. Another of a young boy holding the outspread wings of a dead sparrow, foretells the mysterious, provocative sadness that appears in much of Uelsmann's later work.

Morning Call Articles