Great Artwork While High: Jerry Uelsmann

Stone Meditation

This installment of great artwork to experience whilst high highlights one of my favorite photographers of the modern era, Jerry Uelsmann. A word of caution: looking at Uelsmann’s photos stone cold sober can feel like an acid trip, so ease into your high, good Weedists.

Uelsmann is a first rate photographer and his standard shots are stunning art in their own right. What sets Uelsmann apart, and indeed played a large part in spawning surrealist photography, is the mastery with which he can blend multiple shots onto the same exposure (photomontage). Keep in mind, Uelsmann was creating these mind bending images years before Photoshop and long before any computer could render such an image. His tools were simply a camera, some darkroom alchemy and a fearless curiosity about what might be possible.

Dream Theater

I am an amateur photographer. I have attempted to employ Uelsmann’s techniques with limited success. As much as I would like to pawn my failures off on lesser equipment (I am certain that Uelsmann has better enlargers than I do), I have to just accept the hard truth that not everyone who picks up a guitar sounds like Hendrix.

For those unfamiliar with how anachronistic, borderline steampunk (non-digital) photography works, the art is a delicate interplay of light and time. The settings control the amount of time light is allowed to touch unexposed film as well as the size of the opening (aperature) through which said light travels. The process of turning negatives into pictures operates basically the same way. Using an enlarger, light is shone through a negative onto unexposed photo paper.

What Uelsmann does is set up several negatives on multiple enlargers then he exposes the paper on one enlarger, then moves it to the next, until the image is complete. The process may be simple, but the skill, patience, and meticulousness that is required to pull this off so cleanly is far from easy. Take some time to peruse, and keep in mind that everything you’re looking at is done without a computer and using images of real things. Enjoy Jerry Uelsmann, I think he should have a strain of bud named after him!

Cheers.

Uelsmann

Check out other posts from Weedist’s Great Artwork While High series