Jerry N. Uelsmann’s Fantasy World

The photo-montages of Jerry N. Uelsmann are instantly recognizable among any photographic images made in the second half of the 20th century. Today they stand as the precursor of a photographic image-making approach so well-established and widespread that the previous storm of controversy around them when they first appeared in the early 1960s seems rather far-away, even unthinkable to the younger generations.

Unlike a collage, with which it’s sometimes confused, a composite image is generated on photographic paper or negatives and often looks — at least at first glance — like it’s never been tampered with. Looking at Uelsmann’s works, even when one is aware of the fact that the final image is a composite of some features with landscape elements, one can hardly tell where and how to find the overlaps, as the image offers little or no indication at all of where one layer ends and another begins. Those who employed this photographic technique at that time proposed a radical alternative to the then popular naturalist approach. People were used to the concept that photographs capture but do not create, but photo-montages, by throwing a chaos of information into the real situation, do not care about the boundaries given by the realities.

Eventually, Uelsmann developed his photo-montages to the point where he could blend any number of elements seamlessly into one final image. (Eschewing the expedient way of simply copying negatives, which many photographers employ, he continues to build up composite photographs by producing every selected image with the gelatin silver process in the darkroom.)

It seems to be Uelsmann’s destiny to prove the viability of producing photo-montages with multiple negatives and extensive darkroom work amid all classic photographic methods and then push it to a climax, only to witness its waning fortunes under the advance of electronic imaging. But in a sense, Uelsmann completed a circle of creative process. He can be seen as a connecting link between the preceding and the following. By building a wide international audience for his own work and encouraging his colleagues in their experiments, he helped get people ready for the dawn of the era of computer-generated imagery.

Curator: Hua’er