Guest post by Keith F. Davis
Jerry Uelsmann (right) was a dear friend. I had him give a talk in a symposium I put together in 1995 and he was just great—funny, insightful, and inspiring. We were friends from that point on, and I visited him numerous times in Gainesville.
It was a particular treat to be with him in the darkroom as he worked. His skills there were truly astonishing. My sense was that he hardly had to make test exposures at all—that he could gauge everything so precisely simply from his vast experience and feeling for the materials. That may not literally be true, but it is probably pretty close to the reality. And the simple tools he used to blend images into one another were both remarkable and wonderfully simple. It took some time to get each of his three or four or five enlargers set up properly, with the individual images properly masked, but once that was done, he simply moved his sheet of paper from one easel to the next, making exposures and doing simple dodging and burning as he went. And then the print went into the developer...to emerge under the red light as its own kind of magic.
He understood analogue photography in his own unique and amazing way—unlike anyone else I have ever known. Jerry loved the process dearly. He talked of the darkroom as a laboratory—a place for experimentation and discovery, and that was exactly how he worked.
He was a witty, fascinating person who loved life and loved making pictures. And, of course, ultimately, the two were pretty much one and the same. I will miss him enormously.
Keith
Keith F. Davis, one of the leading American photography museum curators of the last 40 years, retired as the Senior Curator of Photographs at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of numerous publications over many years, including The Origins of American Photography: from Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate and An American Century of Photography: from Dry-Plate to Digital, both of which we were privileged to offer here at special prices in 2016. Here's his Amazon author page.
Book of Interest:
Hank O'Neal, Ed., A Vision Shared: A Portrait of America 1935–1943 (Steidl, 2019). The reissue of the best overall survey of the work of the FSA photographers of the 1930s. Every public and school library should have a copy, for one thing. Thanks to Andy Moursund for turning me on to this book many years ago. Originally published in 1976 by St. Martin's Press.
The book link above is a portal to Amazon.
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Featured Comments from:
J D Ramsey: "I always considered Uelsmann special. Before Photoshop he created images that no one else had. Mystical, sometimes humorous, and entirely different. Unique images that mesmerized. Even now, as it is explained that he used multiple enlargers, it still seems magical. Since Photoshop others have created somewhat similar images (e.g. J.P. Caponigro), but Uelsmann was there first, by decades."
Very nice sentiments from Keith Davis.
Just to expand on his remarks, and J D Ramsey’s comment, Jerry Uelsmann was indeed a master of darkroom tricks. But he was actually among the last, albeit perhaps the most currently renown, in a very long line of chemical-age darkroom compositors. Pre-digital image compositing and manipulation were actually celebrated in a 2012 exhibition at The Met, titled Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. The fascinating catalog is no longer in print but worth hunting on the used market if you’re interested in the subject.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Sunday, 17 April 2022 at 11:49 AM