Jerry N. Uelsmann

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Cover photograph

Apocalypse 11 1967

Jerry N. Uelsmann

Peter C. Bunnell

Russell Edson

A special note of gratitude to my three photographic godfathers:

Ralph Hattersley, Minor White, and Henry Holmes Smith, each of whom answered me with more beautiful questions.

An exhibition of the photographic work of Jerry N. Uelsmann is presented by the Alfred Stieglitz Center of the Philadelphia Museum of Art from December 12th, 1970 through February 7th, 1971. This monograph is published as Aperture, Volume 15, Number 4, as a catalogue for the exhibition, and as a clothbound book for general distribution.

INTRODUCTION

Although I believe my work is basically optimistic, I would like people to view my photographs with on open mind. I am not looking for a specific reaction, but if my images move people or excite them I am satisfied.

I have always felt I photographed the things I loved.

My images say far more than I could say in words. I believe in photography as a way of exploring the possibilities of man. I am committed to photography and life... and the gods have been good to me. What can I say. Treat my images kindly, they are my children.*

In his humanity Jerry Uelsmann is impressively real, yet his photographs, born of a fantast's vision, manipulate our deepest and most fundamental emotions, prompting us to suspect his person in art to be romantically independent of the real. He possesses a rare inspiration which effortlessly moves us. Like all true artists he is motivated by enthusiasm, and by the enjoyment of creation which drives him to share his dreams and experiences with us. Unconsciously, we are under his control and this control has been crucial to his success. His art is essentially direct rather than allusive and his pictures appear analogous to that believable reality so fundamental to photography. But herein is the rub; Uelsmann's interpretative vision pervades each work and causes us to ponder whether reality is really quite so true as invention. Perhaps more consistently than any other photographer of his generation he has sought what Apollinaire called art's greatest potential — surprise.

Upon its introduction photography was understood in terms of a mystery related to its process alone. In recent years this mysterious or even mystical regard has been transferred to the photographer. Today he has become the pivotal figure in a creative metamorphosis which links sensory experience and physical process in such a way so as to reveal in a picture something much greater than the depiction of any subject or thing. What we have come to realize is that the frame of a photograph marks only a provisional limit; that its content points beyond that frame, referring to a multitude of phenomena which cannot possibly be encompassed in their entirety. Thus creativity in photography is the exposition not only of the photographer's receptivity in observation, or the skill of his craftsmanship, but the delineation of spirtual reality wherein the symbol transcends its model.

•These quoted stotemenfs are from Ueismann's lectures, his letters, his conversations with the author, and from his published remarks.

In the depths of any art must reside a personality, and like an instinctive animalistic struggle to recover from birth, the artist aspires to express his self in his work. How lacking in courage is an art in which the creator examines the collective ideal as opposed to the self-centered individualism of his own being. The key to a work of art lies not only in the work itself, but in the artist's outward labor to be someone. Ueismann’s life, his manners, his physical being, his work, all that forms the aggregate of his personality, imparts a final impression experienced at once as both dark and dazzling.

Basically I am dealing with the predicament and condition of man as it directly involves me as an individual.

I have gradually confused photography and life and as the result of this I believe I am able to work out of my self at an almost precognitive level.

Life relates to attitudes. I have my own attitudes to v/ork with, my own ritual, my game of involvement. Images create other images. I cannot be asked to be something other than vshat I am, but I enjoy mind-prodding and mind-stretching.

Learn to use yourself as an instrument.

I first met Jerry Uelsmann at the Rochester Institute of Technology fifteen years ago when we were both students. I don’t recall knowing him well—he wasn’t making photographs then—but he was the kind of person one always knew was around. He had a kind of flamboyance and vitality which can only be described as humor.

Jerry’s humor remains with him today and while it is no less discerning than wit, it has much of the uninhibited earthiness of vaudevillian comedy. It is reflected in his speech, his mildly eccentric clothes, his mania for collecting bric-a-brac, and in his phantasmagorical letters some of which include handwriting, photographs, Victorian valentine stickers, Laurel and Hardy vignettes, peace symbols, and Florida gator heads. It could never be thought that he conducted anything like an old world salon in Gainesville, but a typical “at home” with the Uelsmanns might begin with libations followed by a superb lasagna prepared by his wife Marilynn for a dozen or so people, include a visit to the University of Florida campus for a screening of the complete Flash Gordon serials run end to end, followed by dessert at Dipper Dan’s, and climaxed by a return to the house for a raucous songfest of maudlin church hymns and nifty songs from the twenties conducted, orchestrated, and played with consummate endurance on the grand pianola pedaled by Jerry himself. He has frequently remarked that he prints his photographs best to Beethoven and Bluegrass; and although Earl Scruggs would make a perfect name for his extremely gentle watchdog, he chose instead to name her after a once famous animal photographer. An addict for musicals of the largest, gaudiest, Broadway variety, Jerry entertains a secret desire to be a tap dancer and he would also admit to a love affair with Shirley Temple; that is, before she became an ambassador to the United Nations.

Social humor and amusing antics are significantly absent in Uelsmann's photography, and it is in his photographs that the darker facets of his being become apparent. For one cannot escape the belief that his comedy conceals an intensity of concern for life and personal doubt which Jerry harbors about life's meaning. Indeed his interest in photography goes back to the time when, as a teenager, he discovered he could use the camera to divert attention from himself, or to have it function as a kind of buffer in personal encounters. FJe thought that in so using the camera—or photography—he could exist outside of himself, an idea he would realize in his later life to be naïve. Jerry is passionately in love with life but behind his exuberance is a coldly determined intention to seek the means of expressing the human condition in the most visible way. He understands perfectly well what he is doing. Although he publicly claims innocence in his creations, subtly redirecting inquiries about his approach to the concept of what he calls "in-process discovery," he assuredly possesses what a stranger to him described as "shadow wisdom." Such sagacity befits this double Gemini.

Let us not delude ourselves by the seemingly scientific nature of the darkroom ritual; it has been and always will be a form of alchemy. Our overly precious attitude toward that ritual has tended to conceal from us an innermost world of mystery, enigma, and insight. Once in the darkroom the venturesome mind and spirit should be set free—free to search and hopefully discover.

I can really be excommunicated from the world in the darkroom. In the darkroom, a comfortable kind of situation is needed; for me the darkroom experience seems to relate to the cosmos outside—in fact, the experience seems to relate to an internal/ external cosmology. There is the opportunity for an internal dialogue in the darkroom... a turning inwardly relative to what has been discovered outside... the two coming together. I develop an attitude toward something I am working on and can spend ten hours or more without becoming uncomfortable. I am creating something while I am working... not just technical orientation... really I am midwifing images and this is sort of what I am about. I see myself in terms of my self.

Today the artist, more than the priest, reveals the existence of an intangible extrasensory force which is constantly affective in our life. The artist is the surviving exponent of the mysteries, the last believer in the duality of our world, the last teacher of the method whereby we may establish contact with the mysterious and convert the mysterious into the credible. By so completely absorbing the real world Uelsmann is able to go beyond it. He is able to annihilate it and to create in its absence visions and forms that man has hardly ever seen.

The excruciatingly complex techniques of photomontage are superbly suited to his effort. These techniques are Uelsmann’s alchemy. His volatile photographic images, in which the dominant character is the dynamism of a psychic order, open to the world of magic. I do not believe he could ever satisfy himself with what is termed straight photography, because for him straight photography is not the resolution of a vision, but the beginning of a process. He takes pictures simply, rapidly, and straightforwardly, responding freely to the inspired revelation and recognition he achieves through the camera. With little or no preconceived notion of a finished photograph, he makes enormous numbers of negatives, stores them carefully, and in this way prepares his visual vocabulary for the next step.

In the darkroom he progressively and additively compiles the visual equivalent of his inner vision. He consciously follows the dictates of his insight in the construction of an image. His work would not be as convincing if it were not totally drawn from himself, and this means working with the negatives of no other photographer. It is the intimacy of the personal, half-forgotten image or event, recorded perhaps years previously, which is drawn from the negative file and brought into the light of a new consciousness. Every discrete step is the commencement of a new moment in his life, a fresh vision of reality, a rape of common sense.

One cannot look at the body of Uelsmann's work without recognizing in it the sustained effort, matched by few photographers of his time, to come to grips with all the problems of photography—to achieve in the end an unmitigated integrity of the whole. Nothing is left out. The failures are important; they matter profoundly. The struggle matters too,and in this age of easy images it probably matters most of all.

The contemporary artist in all other areas is no longer restricted to the traditional use of his materials. ..he is not bound to a fully conceived pre-visioned end. One of the major changes seen in modern art is the transition from what was basically an outer-directed art form in the 19th century to the inner-directed art of today. To date, photography has played a minor role in this liberation.

By post-visualization I refer to the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process.

The truth is that one is more frequently blessed with ideas while working.

An old Uelsmann negative gathers no moss.

I'm really very concerned with helping to create an attitude of freedom and daring toward the craft of photography.

Jerry is considered something of the enfant terrible of contemporary photography. Consciously drawing on the work of Robinson and Rejlander, two of the most misunderstood photographers of the last century, he sees himself as their successor. The aim of these men was to create a picture through the combining of photographic bits and pieces. Uelsmann elaborates the discipline to a more complicated and perfected form. Whereas Robinson and Rejlander used the composite photograph as a technique to fabricate a unified picture of a completed event or idea in conventional linear space and time, Uelsmann presents in his approach to photomontage simultaneously varying systems of idea and event as an analog for the inner and non-linear processes of thinking and feeling.

It is too soon to tell what Uelsmann's place will be in the history of photography. But we know even now that contemporary photography is not the same as it would have been without him. Many of us, perhaps all of us, feel richer in having experienced his work and this is something that happens infrequently in a lifetime. I feel confident that he will continue to provide for us the imaginative leap to a reality greater than anything we may otherwise observe.

Peter C. Bunnell

IT.

It was someone as viewed in a mirror, or was it you said it was someone viewing its someone who it is in a mirror where perhaps someone lives only. Someone is not the chair but part of where, where a table and a blue in square is a window and some sky.

MEMORY AND THE SUN

There was once a memory of a person that would not go even though a person had said I do not like memories and died, for there was a habit that needed badly to be repeated. A woman saw the sunshine coming in a window looking through a memory to find a person to form a shadow. He did not like memories or old persons he said, he did not like a habit which is brown in a cup and cigarette turning to smoke. He did not like the sun to repeat him on the wall or the woman to repeat him by name. The sun annoys the woman that if should search the room everyday lighting the wall where he had cursed his shadow. The sun comes everyday because it has become used to coming through a window where it rests safely in its golden gloom. The vain sunlight lying on the floor sunning itself, a yellow kitten made of dust. He had not liked old persons v/ho had become more memory than flesh sitting in the sun like peopleless shadows.

MR BRAIN

Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat shellfish off the moon.

He liked to go info a tree then because there is a little height to see a little further, which may reveal now the stone, a pebble—it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon that you can make sure of.

So Mr Brain opened his mouth to let a moonbeam into his head.

Why to be alone, and you invite the stars to tea.

A cup of tea drinks a luminous guest.

In the winter could you sit quietly by the window, in the evening when you could have vinegar and pretend it to be wine, because you would do well to eat doughnuts and pretend you drink wine as you sit quietly by the window.

You may kick your leg back and forth.

You may have a tendency to not want to look there too long and turn to find darkness in the room because it had become nighttime.

Why to be alone.

You are pretty are you not/ you are as pretty as you are not, or does that make sense.

You are not pretty, that is how you can be alone.

And then you are pretty like fungus and alga, you are no one without some one, in theory alone.

Be good enough to go to bed so you can not think too much longer.

THIS THAT IS

At night in a forest one who is without name or face tears out his own brain to remember what it is he forgets. One who is without name or face runs through the night with his empty head filled with emptiness. An old woman seeing this that runs holds a stick across the forest road to see how if falls. One who is without name or face falls and says, I am that that falls and now memory begins to smack its lips. Come, says the old woman, into my place of candle light.

CLOUDS

A husband and wife climbed to the roof of their house, and each at the extremes of the ridge stood facing the other the while that the clouds took to form and reform.

The husband said, shall we do backward dives, and into windows floating come kissing in a central room-) I am standing on the bottom of an overturned boat, said the wife.

The husband said, shall I somersault along the ridge of the roof and up your legs and through your dress out of the neck of your dress to kiss you?

I am a roof statue on a temple in an archaeologist s dream, said the wife.

The husband said, let us go down now and do what if is to make another come into the world.

Look, said the wife, the eternal clouds.

THE TURNING OFF OF LIGHT

Let us soy a man holding a cup of coffee like a lantern journeys a road with a white figure in parallel personifying light.

They come to a fork, the white figure taking the left or is it the right, but the man taking the opposite, and that is the turning off of light.

The coffee cup a lantern but not a lantern of light, it illuminates without light.

Don't you see sir, the lighting of the nerves, that fuel of hell.

VEGETABLES

At the green grocers a man had bought a monstrous vegetab/e. He had said to the grocer, I will give you a punch in the nose for that green earth child.

No no, the earth is full enough aI tears, said the grocer. \A/elI, may / just take it home and chew it to death? said the man.

Look out, said the grocer, a tomato is watching YOU; and I think a celery would love to break your back.

It would, and maybe a certain green grocer would like me to lift his apron and let the public see his bowed legs? said the man.

II you do maybe Ill turn a doorknob and a door will open, said the grocer. Well, maybe Ill tell the grapes your bellybuttons on your left thumb, said the man.

Oh yeah, well maybe I'll turn around and waif on another customer, said the grocer.

Oh please, Mr. green grocer let me have something green to kill.

Well take this, screamed the grocer.

But when the man got home with his monstrous vegetable his wile said, the grocer has cheated you, this is your son.

FAREWELL TO A MOUSE

One who leaves his home in projection through a thought remembers the small mouse of the wall, whom he has never met more than the small nods of recognition exchanged between them when entering the kitchen, as it were, when hunger moved them both at the same time.

He that is leaving, and remembering the small mouse, decides to write a farewell to the mouse whom he has never met more than the slight smiles given in haste when passing each other in the hall on the way to the bathroom, or the linen closet, or going up to the attic for a short melancholy stay in which an old piece of lace might be fingered, or an old photograph again newly stained by a sudden overflowing of the fear ducts.

What can you say to a dear friend whom you have never met? Can you say I have loved you from afar? Would that seem somehow sexual?

But, in the heart is a mousetrap, which now begins to move down the arms, emerging out of the palm of the left hand.

It is a real mousetrap, Heaven knows where it has come from.

THE YOUNG BOAT

We set out in o young boat, whose bones had not fully come from cartilage.

Wisdom was yet to divide the softness from the softness.

What shall we do as we seek a land in a boat with a rudder as vague as a baby's hand9

WHEN SOMETHING IS BROKEN

When something is broken, you cannot fix it. You have taken a hammer to it, but you cannot fix it. You have banged and banged, and still it is not fixed. You have tried to mend it with your tears, but they are not thick enough. You have tried again with the hammer, and broken it only further. Was it then that the authority removed you from your difficulty and broke you in the house of understanding? It is from the window, there with your back to the room, looking out that you know that tears cannot mend; no matter how intent or tender, tears are not enough....

A CHAIR

A chair has waited such a long time to be with its person. Through shadow and fly buzz and the floating dust it has waited such a long time to be with its person. What it remembers of the forest it forgets, and dreams of a room where it waits—Of the cup and the ceiling—Of the Animate One.

THE MAN ROCK

A man is a rock in a garden of chairs and waits for a longtime to be over. It is easier for a rock in a garden than a man inside his mother. He decided to be a rock when he got outside. A rock asks only what is a rock. A rock waits to be a rock. A rock is a longtime waiting for a longtime to be over so that it may turn and go the other way. A rock awakens into a man. A man looks. A man sleeps back info a rock as it is better for a rock in a garden than a man inside himself trembling in red darkness.

THE ARTIFACT

Someplace is hidden because there is no one there — Where a leaf and a stone has eyes, with a twig as nose, and a squirrel's skeleton a mouth of teeth: look for a time up through the trees at the changing sky. The wind blows a leaf away, one eye closes. Someplace hidden because no one is there looks out of itself at the universe.

THE NEED

If you tolk to o cloud it listens that if does not turn from you. But it changes, the borders of its attention melt out like an aging parent into facsimile shapes. If you talk to a cloud you talk only that you talk; that there is aim to the persuasion; that the force of the need as voice has ear. If you talk to a cloud you talk to yourself, for you have need to talk for you have need.

A VALLEY

Between mountains a man is well acquainted with desire. He cannot live here like a secret, desiring and desired. He lives here, as all do. Soon the difficulty dies with the man. But until it does it is not made less because we know the end.

THE SUICIDE

After I heard about murder I said to a door you may rest in your sill, and so I closed it and drew the shades on the windows. It was a wooden box I lived in because I knew someone was hurt. I let no light of any moon or sun come in because someone dies by the hand of man without the intervention of God. I shut my eyes and held my ears because someone is badly used. I closed my mind with sleeping pills. I murdered myself that I might shut out the murder of others.

THE EMPTINESS

As he was alone he sat on a chair. No use standing with open arms. Only the wind comes and will not be held. On a bad day the wind will knock you down and run right over you to further pleasures. When alone one describes one step of a stairway, and sitting there describes till late at night under those high things that glow in the sky; with much wonder about the structure of the eye. Till again one must put oneself to bed to close out the emptiness.