Jerry Uelsmann

Apocalypse II, 1967

Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934, Detroit, Michigan) became interested in photography as a teenager, developing film from the age of fourteen. He earned a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MS and MFA from Indiana University in 1960. That same year he joined the faculty of the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he taught photography for nearly four decades until his retirement in 1998. Early in his career, Uelsmann began working with multiple enlargers simultaneously to combine several negatives into a single print, building up complex, seamless composite images through dodging, burning, and repeated exposure across negatives rather than through cutting and pasting or digital manipulation. He acknowledged a debt to the nineteenth-century combination-printing pioneers Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, and continued to work entirely in the analog darkroom throughout his career, even after digital tools such as Photoshop became widely available. His first solo exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967, established his reputation early, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year. Over the course of his career his photographs entered the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others, and were the subject of retrospective monographs including Uelsmann: Process and Perception (1985), Silver Meditations (1988), and Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective (2014).