Jerry Uelsmann - Fine Art Photography

Multiple exposure images

From an except of an article written by David Robertson

…If you’re not familiar with the work of master photographic artist Jerry Uelsmann, you’ll probably think that you’re looking at some extraordinary digital images on the following pages. The truth is that Uelsmann is the best-known artist in his field in the world, and there’s not one bit of computer work here. For more than 35 years, he has taken pictures of a multitude of subjects and combined them through elaborate systems of his own design to create tremendous works of art that currently reside in the permanent collections of more than 100 museums worldwide….

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Detroit on June 11,1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his B.F.A. degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. at Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960 (“my first job offer”). He has been graduate research professor of art at the university since 1974. Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, a founding member of the American Society for Photographic Education, and a trustee of the Friends of Photography.

Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto.

His other books are Jerry N. Uelsmann (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1970); John L. Ward, The Criticism of Photography as Art: The Photographs of Jerry Uelsmann (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1970); Jerry Uelsmann: Silver Meditations (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1975); Jerry N. Uelsmann: Photography from 1975-79 (Chicago: Columbia College, 1980); Jerry N. Uelsmann – Twenty-five Years: A Retrospective (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1982); and Uelsmann: Process and Perception (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida,1985).

This biography is an excerpt from Photo Synthesis.