Untitled

Jerry N. Uelsmann

1976, printed 1980 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Uelsmann revived the technique of combination printing pioneered by such Victorian art photographers as Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson in the early 1960s, when darkroom manipulation was denigrated by many proponents of straight photography as a flagrant violation of photographic purity. His pictures, which he creates in a darkroom equipped with seven enlargers, are filled with mind-bending paradoxes, oblique symbolism, and bizarre contrasts of scale. Uelsmann’s work is now considered an important precursor to the seamless compositing widely associated with digital photography and Photoshop.

Artist

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Date

1976, printed 1980

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1981