I saw Jerry‘s work for the first time at the Witkin gallery, I guess in the 1980s, when the gallery was on West Broadway. I was still in the process of falling deeply in love with photography, and his work was a revelation. Seeing his prints changed what was possible for me, photographically – and probably in other ways, as well. His photographs changed the way I saw photography. They changed the way I saw. Period.

 

I set up my first darkroom when I was about 18, and it wasn’t long before I added a second enlarger, and then a third, so I could put a different negative in each enlarger, and expose multiple images onto a single piece of paper, just like Jerry did. It was Jerry’s influence (of course, he had no idea that I existed) that led me to my lifelong love of multiple-imaging, which laid the ground for me to be not only completely open digital imaging, but to embrace it wholeheartedly when my friend Antonio introduced me to Photoshop 3.0 (layers!) in 1994.

 

I’ve often jokingly referred to myself, photographically, as the bastard stepchild of Jerry Uelsmann and Ansel Adams. My process places almost equal value on both classic camera-based zone-system pre-visualization and Jerry Uelsmann’s darkroom-based post-visualization (a phrase I believe he coined to describe his process – with the added bonus of jokingly poking fun at Ansel, and the old-school, in general. After all, Uelsmann’s composites were controversial, particularly with those invested in the myth of “straight” photography as real photography.) In the same vein, Paul Caponigro (another of my photographic heroes) said, “If you believe in pre-visualization you deserve what you get.” Caponigro meant we need to leave room for unseen forces to play a hand in our creative processes – room for the unexpected. Room for fun. Uelsmann’s work was fun. I heard him say his goal was not just to surprise himself with his own work, but to astonish himself.

 

I met Jerry twice. Once in 2015 the SPE conference in New Orleans. He had an opening for an exhibition of his work at Joshua Mann Pailet’s wonderful Gallery for Fine Photography in the French Quarter, and it was a joy to spend a little time talking with Uelsmann at the gallery. Another time, I chatted him up after a panel discussion at the Javits Center during the annual Photo Expo, and my friend Andy took a picture of the two of us together. Jerry Uelsmann’s work is ingrained in me, but I wish I had gotten to know the man himself better.

 

At FotoFest in 2014, I went to a very well-attended talk Jerry gave in honor of his 80th birthday – where he shared his mistakes with us. He could’ve talked about his greatest hits, or (like so many photographers would have done, given the opportunity) regaled us with stories about himself. What he did instead was show us variations on multiple images that didn’t work. I think it says so much about the man that, given the spotlight, he used it to help us with our own process… to help us see better. In that talk, he pulled back the curtain on his process further than he had in his books, showing us how he (just like the rest of us) made lots of bad pictures in order to find his way to the good ones. He showed us how he played with variations on his composites, trying different elements together until he struck on an image worthy of his standards. The way he worked was an illustration that creativity is a process, and that real creativity means going to work not knowing exactly how things are going to turn out. Room for surprise. Process and Perception. That was the title of one of his books, and, in a sense, the focus of his life. Mine, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps more than anything else, I’m grateful to Jerry for teaching me that we each create our own reality. Thank you, Jerry. May you rest in peace, in a beautiful world of your own making.