GALLERIES
A Gallery for Fine Photography
John Cleary Gallery
INTERVIEW
BIOGRAPHY
“A pioneer in the art of multilayered imagery, photographer Jerry Uelsmann (born 1934) is best known for his seamlessly grafted 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 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. The strongest early influence on his creative process came from instructors like Minor White and Ralph Hattersley at the Rochester Institute. As Uelsmann put it, the most significant lesson he learned from White was that his camera had the ability not only to record images, but also that "it did have the potential of transcending the initial subject matter." As a teacher, White was concerned less with teaching the technical details of the camera-lens system than he was with using that system to transform what was seen.”
QUOTES
“There’s a lot of source material once you have the freedom of not having to complete an image at the camera.”
“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.”
-From an interview by Chris Maher and Larry Berman, Shutterbug Magazine, September 2007
I am attracted to Jerry Uelsmann’s work for his seamless combination of negatives in the darkroom. His scenes are very surreal, yet they exist momentarily for the viewer. He allows different environments, people, and objects to live in a world that doesn’t exist to the naked eye. I have been attempting to combine PNP paper negatives, combining my old photographs with new ones, allowing myself to interact on paper with the past. And there is no one better than Jerry Uelsmann to look at for inspiration with this method.
Untitled, 1983
Untitled, 1982
Alpha Tree, 2002
Self-Reflection, 2009
Untitled, 2008
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