MASTERWORKS
JERRY UELSMANN
Exhibition Dates: November 23 - January 10, 2002
Reception for the Artist: Friday, November 23, 5-7 p.m.

Andrew Smith Gallery celebrates Thanksgiving Weekend with an exhibit of silver print photographs by Jerry Uelsmann, the master of photomontage. MASTERWORKS: JERRY UELSMANN opens Friday, November 23, 2001, with a reception for the artist from 5 to 7 p.m. Jerry Uelsmann is one of America's most important contemporary photographers, known throughout the world for his dream-like scenes created by hand printing multiple negatives on single sheets of paper. For decades, Uelsmann's composite, surreal photographs have evoked myth, magic, humor, and melancholy. His enigmatic images of nature, the human figure, exterior and interior environments, and human relationships transcend personal symbols to become doorways into the collective psyche.

Once considered iconoclastic, Uelsmann's photographs are now very much part of the classic traditions of 20th Century photography. In the 1960s, encouraged by his mentor Henry Holmes Smith, Uelsmann set about to convince critics that photography offered alternatives to the conventional "purist" sensibility that had driven the medium since the time of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Photographs, Uelsmann argued, could do more than merely describe literal objects and scenes; they could evoke elusive states of feeling and thinking triggered by irrational and imaginative juxtapositions of disparate images. According to photo-historian Peter C. Bunnell, Uelsmann was following in the footsteps of the nineteenth century photographers H.P. Robinson and O.G. Rejlander who had created pictures by combining photographic bits and pieces. Using up to seven enlargers in the darkroom, Uelsmann perfected the laborious technique of printing images from multiple negatives. For him, darkroom work is a constant process of search and discovery; the antithesis of the "previsualization" approach used by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston who calculated in advance what the photographic image should look like. Thus, Uelsmann has created a hybridized style of image-making uniquely his own, one that challenged conventional notions of reality, and changed the language and directions of photography.

Each Uelsmann photograph is a dramatic, impossible moment in which events that shouldn't be together occupy the same space. Uelsmann's flawless printing technique makes it difficult to discern what part of the photograph is manipulated and what is straight. In Untitled, 1989, the top of an office desk is on fire next to a solitary chair. This conflagration takes place in a tree-framed landscape with the mountains of Yosemite in the background. In 1973 Ansel Adams invited Uelsmann to give a workshop in Yosemite. Subsequently, Uelsmann spent much time in the area conducting workshops and hiking through the wilderness. The result was a large body of work that explored the stunningly beautiful landscape of Yosemite. Many of the photographs from this series are playful. But Uelsmann chose the symbol of the burning desk as a way to express ecological issues; the threat of urban intrusion to pristine wilderness areas.

Untitled, 1976, is one of Uelsmann's most popular and perplexing works. Although Uelsmann seldom titles his photographs this one is informally known as, The Philosopher's Study. In an opulent Victorian drawing room filled with bookshelves and a fireplace, a large writing desk sits on an ornate rug. The top of the writing desk is raised to hold an open book and upon this book walks a very real, if miniature, man whose head is bent as if deep in thought. Adding to the surrealism, is the fact that the room has no ceiling. Instead, clouds drift overhead in a sunlit sky. In this Alice and Wonderland-like tableau the impression of Victorian security jolts up against an infinite abyss.

In Untitled, 1983, a rounded gateway in a brick wall dominates the center of the picture plane. This somewhat forboding opening is barricaded by a spiky metal fence which prevents the possibility of entrance. Above the gateway the brick wall dissolves into billowing cumulus clouds whose softness contrasts with the firmly shut gate. On a square cobblestone patio in front of the gateway rests a large silvery ball from which two hands emerge. Their restful, graceful gesture implies acceptance of change rather than force. This is a photograph suggesting both promise and denial, as well as something still evolving from an egg-like state of being.

Untitled, 1975 is an especially dream-like image that seems to simultaneously allude to birth and death, culture and nature, and transformations of the human spirit. In the photograph a man walks hip-deep through a channel of sparkling water that leads to a foliage-covered wall and a half open wooden door. Because he is in shadow it is ambiguous if the man is walking toward or away from the dark, tunnel-like space behind the door. The water through which he walks is contained on either side by uniform street curbs bounded by grass and trees. Toward the top of the photograph the foliage of the wall is in a state of transforming from plants into rocks that are viewed through crystalline water .

Jerry Uelsmann was born in Detroit in 1934. He studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology and Indiana University and was deeply influenced by Ralph Hattersley, Minor White, and, especially, Henry Holmes Smith. His numerous books include Jerry Uelsmann: Photo Synthesis (University Press of Florida, 1992), Uelsmann: Process and Perception (University Presses of Florida, 1985), and Jerry N. Uelsmann (An Aperture Monograph New York, 1971). His work is in major museum collections through the world. Mr. Uelsmann recently retired from teaching at the University of Florida, Gainesville where he had taught since 1960. He continues to photograph and lecture about his work.


Liz Kay
Andrew Smith Gallery, Inc.