For Jerry N. Uelsmann, the darkroom was the space where photographic dreams were made. Long before the invention of Adobe Photoshop, Uelsmann (1934-2022) distinguished himself as a modern pioneer of photomontage. By exposing multiple negatives onto a single piece of photo paper, in his works, like those on display here and part of a recent gift to our permanent collection, Uelsmann dismisses the idea of pre-visualization — that the artist should compose his image entirely in-camera without further alteration once the shutter is clicked — a concept popularized by Ansel Adams in the 1960s. 

Instead, as seen in this installation, Uelsmann posits the idea of post-visualization — that the photographic process should be flexible and can extend past the moment captured.  Multiple photographs, he insists, can be manipulated to create a singular, seamless image in the darkroom.   While each element of a Uelsmann work — animate, inanimate, or otherwise — is identifiable on its own, it is the artist’s juxtapositions of those recognizable aspects of our world that can unsettle us.  At times disturbing, romantic, humorous, and unpredictable and guided only by a skillful hand and artistic intuition, Uelsmann’s hallucinatory scenes appear to exist within a world too real to be implausible.