Jerry Uelsmann, Surreal Image-Maker, Dies at 87
He did not believe that a photographer's creativity ended with the click of the shutter; in his darkroom, he combined elements of multiple pictures to create something new.
June 11, 1934 — April 4, 2022
Jerry Uelsmann Memorial Hall
Museum Hanmi Gimpo in Gyeonggi-do, South Korea is opening a permanent memorial hall dedicated to Jerry Uelsmann — centered around his studio and works. A preview exhibition is currently on view at the Museum Hanmi Samcheong Annex in Seoul.
Untitled, 1982
Jerry Uelsmann, a photographer who ingeniously used darkroom techniques to manipulate his black-and-white pictures into surreal montages that anticipated by many years the digital image-editing revolutionized by Adobe Photoshop, died on April 4 in Gainesville, Fla. He was 87.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son, Andrew, said.
Mr. Uelsmann's dreamlike imagery seems to ignore the laws of gravity and rationality, much as the paintings of René Magritte did.
In Mr. Uelsmann's imaginative alternate universe, boats float above clouds and waterfalls. Hands that morph from a tree trunk gently hold a bird's nest. Five empty chairs situated magically on a pond face a fifth chair, as if they're holding a meeting.
Working in his darkroom with as many as seven enlargers, each holding a different negative, Mr. Uelsmann moved a sheet of photographic paper from enlarger to enlarger, creating a photomontage filled with paradoxes, wonder and symbolism.
"The primary creative gesture for most photographers used to be when they clicked the shutter. But I realized that the darkroom was a visual research lab where the creative process could continue."
"If I have an ultimate goal, it is to amaze myself."
Apocalypse II, 1967
Philip Gefter, a photography critic, wrote that Mr. Uelsmann "artfully juxtaposed his very precise photographs of actual objects, creating unusual incongruities to surreal effects."
Mr. Uelsmann's work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe. In New York it was included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2012 show "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop."
Mia Fineman, who curated the show, said: "He was outside of the mainstream of photographic art-making, which really had a fixation on the purity of the straight photograph. He went against all that."
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Untitled, 1976
Untitled, 1980
Dream Theater, 2004
Early Life and Education
Self-portrait by Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Norman Uelsmann was born on June 11, 1934, in Detroit. At 12, he began taking drawing lessons at the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum. In high school he was a photographer for the student newspaper.
When he entered the Rochester Institute of Technology, his goal was to be a portrait photographer. Under the influence of teachers like Minor White, he began to see a wider world in photography.
After graduating with a BFA in 1957, Mr. Uelsmann earned an MFA in photography at Indiana University in 1960.
Teaching and Recognition
From 1960 to 1998, he taught photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967, the year he had a solo exhibition at MoMA in New York.
"He meditates on his pictures, experiments with print techniques, recombining pictures, and the result is truly artistic and new."
The Analog Artist in a Digital Age
Mr. Uelsmann understood the benefits of Photoshop but chose not to abandon his analog artistry. "If I were 22, I would probably be working in Photoshop," he told The Times.
In 2013, Photoshop's Twitter account shared an article about him with the message: "Jerry Uelsmann's incredible composites remind us that imagination is everything."
In addition to his son, Mr. Uelsmann is survived by two grandchildren.
Further Reading
Additional press coverage and tributes can be found on our Press page.