Summary for Jerry Uelsmann by Ziye Zhang
Jerry Uelsmann, an early representative of montage in the United States, created a new image by cutting and combining multiple photos. When he started his art creation, there was no computer software to synthesize the photos, so he opened and spliced them in the darkroom. Even now, he doesn’t use electronic devices to synthesize the montage effect he wants. He thought: “I am sympathetic to the current digital revolution and excited by the visual options created by the computer. However, I feel my creative process remains intrinsically linked to the alchemy of the darkroom.”
His works give people a dreamlike feeling in his unique way. Among his works, landscape works account for the vast majority. Although portraits often appear in his works, they are not dominant. In his eyes, objects are related to each other, and human beings can interpenetrate them. This means that in his photos, people themselves are more like a kind of “landscape”, which integrates with the environment.
All his works are black and white photography. This means that all his works ignore the color of the objects and only retain the grayscale. Because of this, he can stack different photos together in the darkroom to make the effect better. What’s interesting is that people don’t think it’s abrupt when they look at these pictures, such as the church embedded in the stump: because their gray levels are close to each other, people will be more receptive to this change.