Salem, Mass.

It really isn't fair: Jerry Uelsmann, who was born in 1934, had to devise ingenious darkroom techniques to create surrealistic images that nowadays anyone competent with Photoshop can produce with ease. But being able to reverse positive and negative versions of a photograph and to merge two or more photographs into a single composition are only the mechanical aspects of Mr. Uelsmann's art. The indispensable element of his work is his ability to envision images that are totally impossible, but absolutely right. It takes more than the most complex computer program to do that.

The Mind's Eye: 50 Years of Photography By Jerry Uelsmann

Peabody Essex Museum
Through June 30

"The Mind's Eye," a retrospective of Mr. Uelsmann's career at the Peabody Essex Museum, is the first in a series of exhibitions that Phillip Prodger, the curator of photography, has planned for PEM's 2012 Year of Photography. Given the idiosyncratic nature of Mr. Uelsmann's pictures, he may seem an unlikely choice with which to begin the series. But, in fact, his work is deeply imbued with the history of the medium. "Full Dome" (1973) is a wry comment on his friend Ansel Adams's famous picture of the Half Dome peak in Yosemite National Park: He printed his picture of the mountain on one side of the paper, flipped the negative and printed it again of the other side to make a perfectly symmetrical—but plausible—Full Dome. "Untitled" (1969) was shot at Point Lobos, the beach that figures in many photographs by Edward Weston and other California photographers. Rather than show the majestic sweep of the ocean, it concentrates on the shriveled innards of a clam.

'Apocalypse II' (1967) Jerry Uelsmann

Visual wit figures in many of Mr. Uelsmann's pictures. In "Self-Portrait as Robinson and Rejlander" (1964), he appears naked twice, once with and once without eyeglasses, sitting in a bathtub. This is his homage to two mid-19th-century British photographers famous for their composite pictures. Other works pay respects to Surrealist photographers Man Ray and Lee Miller, as well as artists Joseph Cornell and René Magritte. "Philistine's Eye" (1961), a human eye peering out of a urinal, must owe its inspiration to Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain."

PEM has up many of Mr. Uelsmann's best-known works, nearly all black and white. The elements that recur most frequently are trees, rocks, bodies of water, naked women, decaying houses, children, sky, and scenes imagined underground, all psychologically potent, even totemic. In a noted image, "Untitled" (1969), a tree with a full canopy of branches and leaves hovers over a small island that hovers, in turn, over a body of placid water. The reflection of the underside of the island looks something like a gigantic open peapod. A smaller version of the tree drifts away in the sky to the right toward a distant line of snow-covered mountains. Like so many of Mr. Uelsmann's pictures, this is a very satisfying image to look at. In spite of its contradiction of nature, we feel we are in the hands of a beneficent conjuror.

A similar tree in full leaf appears in the upper half of "Untitled" (1963), where it is firmly situated on a crest of land. The bottom of the picture takes us underground, where we see that instead of the trunk putting down conventional roots, a single enormous leaf is attached to it; but the veins of the leaf are exposed and branch out the same way roots do, just more regularly. The image is very simple in that it has few components, but it is like a Möbius strip in its emotional complexity. We contemplate the image and the ideas it generates and the feelings the ideas generate, and they all seem to chase themselves around in an endless circle that somehow keeps bringing us back to where we began.

"Untitled" (1997) is another one of Mr. Uelsmann's frequently reproduced works. A waterfall takes up the entire middle of the picture; at the very top of the picture a row of trees and a house are seen reflected in the water, but the water is white and has a cloudlike texture; at the bottom, levitating over the spume sent up by the waterfall, is a rowboat with its oars resting on the gunwales; the rowboat casts a shadow onto the foam, so we see it is elevated. The danger implied by the torrential waterfall is at odds with the serenity of the rowboat. The house at the top indicates the presence of man, but the rowboat is unoccupied. There is no sense in trying to puzzle out what the picture might mean; it is not a rebus to be interpreted, but a new fact presented for us to experience.

'Magritte's Touchstone (first version)' (1965) Jerry Uelsmann

The young and attractive woman seen in two poses in "Untitled" (1980) is naked and certainly a sexual creature—her breasts and pudendum are visible—but, like most of the women in Mr. Uelsmann's pictures, not particularly erotic. She, in her twin aspects, one with her eyes closed and one with them open, is another of his objects of contemplation, somewhat mystical in her doubling, but not so esoteric as to deny she is essentially human. In a brief movie shown continuously in an alcove, Mr. Uelsmann demonstrates how he makes his enigmatic photomontages.

"The Mind's Eye" is an appropriate exhibition to inaugurate the Year of Photography because it reminds us that the image is what the image-maker wants it to be, and this is no less true of photography than any other medium. Ansel Adams will have an exhibition later in the series and, although he is considered a straight photographer, those familiar with his technical brilliance know how much his prints owe to manipulation in the darkroom. In the end, all artful photographs are mediated, either as Adams did to appear more natural, or as Mr. Uelsmann does to establish an independent domain.

Mr. Meyers writes on photography for the Wall Street Journal. See his work at