His work is simply breathtaking. I’ve never seen anything like it! Jerry Uelsmann, a great fantasist and explorer of boundaries of photographic medium has convinced me to write more about great artists.
Uelsmann is best known for his experiments with complex multiple prints, negative imagery and other techniques in elaborating a totaly strange world: angels, floating trees, clouds, women converted in water and other personal mythology elements.
Uselmann was born in Detroit, Michigan and developed a special interest in photography as a high-school student. He graduated in the first four-year B.F.A. degree program in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957, and published his first image in Photography Annual of that year. He was Instructor of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Jerry’s first one-man exhibition was held at the Jacksonville Art Museum in Jacksonville Florida, in 1963. The following year, his first important portfolio of work appeared in Contemporary Photographer. Uelsmann was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for “Experiments in Multiple Printing Techniques in Photography” in 1967 and in 1968 he began an extensive lecture tour and printmaking demonstration at schools including the Rhode Island School of Design, MIT, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1973, and also rewarded with a Certificate of Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In a 1981 report by American Photographer, Uelsmann’s work was named one of the ten most collected in the country.
Nowadays Jerry Uelsmann is a master of composite photographs with multiple negatives and extensive darkroom work. He believes that the final image need not to be tied to a single negative, but may be composed of many more. He also seek to create allegorical surrealist imagery of the unfathomable. This is why, with the lack of Photoshop, Uelsmann was considered to have almost “magical skills” and his photos regarded as documentary evidence of events.
Take a look, you’ll be enchanted!
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