Jerry N. Uelsmann

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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. 1957 was an important year to Uelsmann. He graduated from the Rochester Institute, marred Marylin Kamischke of Detroit, and saw the publication of his first photograph in Photography Annual. Uelsmann entered Indiana University's graduate school, to study audio-visual communication. He began work as a graduate assistant in the laboratory at Indiana, but decided that this was not the right field for him. In 1958, he transferred to the Department of Art, where he undertook intensive studies in art history and collaborated with another student to produce a five-part series on photography for a local educational television station.

At Indiana, Uelsmann studied with Henry Holmes Smith, who helped to shape his approach to photography as a creative medium rather than just a means of recording a particular moment on celluloid. He graduated from Indiana in 1960, with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Soon after graduation, Uelsmann joined the faculty of the Department of Art, at the University of Florida, where he began teaching photography. Uelsmann held his first major solo exhibition at the Jacksonville [Florida] Art Museum in 1963. In 1966, he became an associate professor, at the University of Florida, and was elected to the board of directors of the Society for Photographic Education. The following year, he held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Experiments in Multiple Printing Techniques in Photography." Uelsmann lived and worked in Gainesville, Florida during the period of his fellowship. By then, he had completed building his home, which incorporated a darkroom where he could continue experimenting and refining his technique. He calls the darkroom his "visual research laboratory." He was introduced to the European audience the same year, when his work was published in Camera. In 1971 he delivered the fourth Bertram Cox Memorial Lecture for the Royal Photographic Society, in London, titled "Some Humanistic Considerations of Photography." The lecture was repeated in four other cities.

The National Endowment for the Arts granted Uelsmann a fellowship in 1972. The following year, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of the U.K. He divorced his first wife and married F. Diane Farris in 1975. Uelsmann has exhibited his work in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and overseas. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of major U.S. museums as well as those in Japan, Sweden, France, and Australia. Uelsmann's work defies easy definition, but his photo fantasies have a quality that captures the interest of even the most down-to-earth of his viewers. Uelsmann's book Process and Perception (1985) revealed, frame by frame, how he synthesizes his final print from the negatives chosen for a given composition. He uses only his own negatives from the pictures he shoots, often without a specific composition in mind, and maintains a vast collection of negatives for what Peter C. Bunnell called "his visual vocabulary."

A pioneer in the art of multilayered imagery, photographer Jerry Uelsmann  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.