Text from The Encyclopedia of Photography (1986)

Uelsmann, Jerry N.
American, 1934-

Jerry Uelsmann has been a fantasist and explorer of the boundaries of the photographic medium for over 25 years. He has experimented with complex multiple prints, negative imagery, and other techniques in elaborating a personal mythology the elements of which include nudes, floating trees, clouds, reflections in bodies of water, details of plants; his work emphasizes the ambiguities of space and scale. He has been a prominent spokesman for "post-visualization" that is, "the willingness on the part of the photographer to revisualize the final image at any point in the entire photographic process."

Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan, and developed an interest in photography as a high-school student. He graduated in the first four-year B.F.A. degree program in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957, and published his first image in Photography Annual of that year. Ralph Hattersley and Minor White were his major influences as teachers. Continuing his studies in audio-visual communications, art history, and design, he worked under Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University, where he received a M.F.A. degree in 1960.

For the next four years Uelsmann was Instructor of Art at the University of Florida, Gainesville (where he has continued to teach) on a faculty which included Van Deren Coke. In 1964 Uelsmann was a founding member of the Society for Photographic Education. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the Society two years later.

Uelsmann's first one-man exhibition, of 103 photographs, was held at the Jacksonville Art Museum in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1963. The following year his first important portfolio of work appeared in Contemporary Photographer.

He began to use the darkroom as a "visual research lab" in 1965. In 1966 he was appointed Associate Professor of Art. A major one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was mounted by John Szarkowski in 1967. Uelsmann was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Experiments in Multiple Printing Techniques in Photography" the same year. In 1968 he began an extensive lecture tour and printmaking demonstration at schools including the Rhode Island School of Design, MIT, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Aperture published a major essay by William E. Parker on his work at this time.

In 1969 Uelsmann was named Professor of Art and began teaching under the auspices of the Friends of Photography. He was cited for Special Recognition by the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1970. Two years later he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1973, the year an entire issue of Aperture was devoted to his work with an essay by Peter Bunnell.

Uelsmann was appointed Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida in 1974. He has been the recipient of a Certificate of Merit from the Society of Publication Designers and a Certificate of Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

In addition to the exhibitions mentioned, retrospectives of Uelsmann's work have been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Witkin Gallery in New York City. In a 1981 report by American Photographer, Uelsmann's work was named one of the ten most collected in the country.