Long before layer masks, Jerry Uelsmann was blending a tree into a cloud, a house into a sky and a hand into a landscape, entirely with light, chemistry and paper. If you build key visuals, covers or campaign images from several photographs, his work shows how to make the joins disappear.
A note on images: none of the Uelsmann photographs held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art is flagged public domain, so this guide describes his work in text only. For historic images cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Jerry Uelsmann?
Jerry N. Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan, on 11 June 1934; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art both record him as American and born in 1934. He studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where his teachers included Minor White and Ralph Hattersley, and graduated in 1957, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. He then went to Indiana University, where he worked with the photographer and teacher Henry Holmes Smith and completed graduate degrees in 1960; the Smithsonian American Art Museum lists an MS and an MFA, and the Florida Artists Hall of Fame describes an MFA with Smith.
In 1960 he began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he stayed for the rest of his career; the university’s research magazine Explore records that he became a graduate research professor of art in 1974. He died in Gainesville on 4 April 2022, aged 87, as reported by The New York Times and the Associated Press and noted by the university’s Harn Museum of Art. In 2023 the Harn opened a chronological exhibition of 37 of his photographs drawn from its collection and his Gainesville archive.
A career in key works
All of the works below are gelatin silver prints unless noted.
- Symbolic Mutation (1961). An early, small print, about 16 by 14 centimetres, in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
- Bless Our Home and Eagle (1962). Held by both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
- Tree Growing Out of Leaf (1964). In the Cleveland Museum of Art. The title states the visual trick plainly: one natural form sprouts from another at a different scale.
- Small Wood Where I Met Myself, Journey Into Self, Sky House and Apocalypse I and II (all 1967). A cluster of prints in the Art Institute of Chicago from the year of his solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
- Untitled (c. 1968). The Art Institute of Chicago holds a gelatin silver print mounted on a greeting card, a reminder that he also put his images into everyday printed formats.
- Untitled (1968), offset lithograph. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds this printed-ink version, about 30 by 22 centimetres.
- Eye Chair (1969) and Untitled (Floating Tree and Peapod) (1969). At the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art respectively. Both titles describe objects pulled out of their usual context and set side by side.
- Life/Metaphor (2002). A late print in the Cleveland Museum of Art, showing that he kept working in the wet darkroom well into the digital era.
The turning point in public recognition came in 1967. The Museum of Modern Art’s press release for that year announced an exhibition of his photographs from 15 February to 16 April, selected by John Szarkowski, director of the museum’s Department of Photography, and the chronology in the 1970 Aperture monograph on Uelsmann also records the show.
Technique: post-visualization and the row of enlargers
Uelsmann named his approach in a talk called “Post-Visualization”, delivered to the Society for Photographic Education in Chicago; the chronology in the 1970 Aperture monograph dates it to 1965, and the essay was printed in the Florida Quarterly in summer 1967. The title was a deliberate reversal. Many photographers of the time valued pre-visualization, deciding on the final print before releasing the shutter. Uelsmann argued for leaving room to discover the image later, at the enlarger, by combining negatives that had been made separately. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1967 press release quoted his call to allow for post-visualization and described his prints as made with multiple printing and other darkroom techniques.
The working method is described consistently in his obituaries. He set up several enlargers side by side, up to seven according to the Associated Press, each holding a different negative. A single sheet of photographic paper was moved from one enlarger to the next and exposed in turn, with the areas that should not receive light held back by hand, so that each negative printed only where it belonged.
Three practical consequences follow from that process, and they are worth noticing in any print you see:
- Soft seams. Because the masking was done by hand rather than with a hard-edged cut, transitions tend to fade gradually, often along a horizon, a tree line or the edge of a reflection.
- One tonal key. Every negative is printed onto the same paper and developed together, so the blacks, greys and highlights share a single range. Elements from different days and places read as one scene.
Combining negatives was not new: Victorian photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson built tableaux from several negatives in the 1850s. What Uelsmann changed was the purpose: rather than a believable narrative scene, he aimed for a believable impossibility.
What to look at in a Jerry Uelsmann print
Symmetry and mirroring. Many of his compositions are built around a central axis or a reflection, with land and water, or upper and lower halves, answering one another. Mirroring gives an invented scene an internal logic the eye accepts.
Scale shifts. Titles such as Tree Growing Out of Leaf point to the core device: something small becomes the support for something large. The surprise lives in the scale relationship, not in any special effect.
Ordinary motifs. Trees, rocks, houses, chairs, eyes and skies recur. The plain vocabulary keeps the images from feeling like trick photography.
Horizon as hinge. The seam between two negatives is often hidden along a horizon line or water edge, where the eye expects a change of tone anyway.
Black-and-white restraint. Without colour to match, everything depends on tone, texture and the direction of light.
If the dreamlike logic reminds you of painting, it should: compare the displaced objects and floating forms in our guide to René Magritte, and the darkroom experiments of Man Ray, who also treated the photographic print as a site of invention rather than record.
How designers can borrow Jerry Uelsmann’s ideas
- Shoot a library, then compose. Post-visualization is a workflow: collect strong single elements, such as skies, textures, objects and figures, without knowing their final use, and build the image later.
- Match light before anything else. Choose source images lit from the same side and at a similar contrast before you start masking.
- Feather the seam and hide it in a natural edge. Use soft, wide masks rather than hard cut-outs, and place joins along horizons, water lines or foliage.
- Unify with one grade. Convert all layers to a shared black-and-white or duotone treatment, or apply one colour grade over the whole stack, to imitate the single sheet of paper.
- Make one surprising move, not five. His strongest images rest on a single impossible relationship, such as a scale shift or a mirrored world. Edit your concept down to one idea a viewer can grasp in a glance.
Uelsmann’s photographs are in copyright, so take his methods into your own source images rather than reproducing his prints.
Where to see Jerry Uelsmann’s work
The Art Institute of Chicago holds a large group of his 1960s and early 1970s prints, including Small Wood Where I Met Myself, Sky House and Eye Chair. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds prints from 1961 to 2002, including Symbolic Mutation and Life/Metaphor. The Met and the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville also hold his work. For another artist who used the photographic image to stage identity and dream, see our guide to Claude Cahun.
Frequently asked questions
What is Jerry Uelsmann known for?
He is known for surreal black-and-white photographs made by combining several negatives on one print in the darkroom. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a solo exhibition in 1967, selected by John Szarkowski.
How did Jerry Uelsmann make his photographs?
He lined up several enlargers, up to seven according to the Associated Press, each holding a different negative, and moved one sheet of photographic paper between them, masking areas by hand so each negative printed only where he wanted it.
What does post-visualization mean?
It is Uelsmann’s term for deciding on the final image after the photographs are taken, at the enlarger, rather than fixing it in advance. He set out the idea in a talk to the Society for Photographic Education and an essay published in 1967.
Can I use Jerry Uelsmann’s photographs in my designs?
No. He died in 2022 and his photographs are in copyright. You can learn from his compositing methods and apply them to your own photography, but do not reproduce his prints.
