I was saddened to read last week that Jerry Uelsmann has died.
During college, we probably spent at least 95% of our time learning about art and artists of the past, but Uelsmann was a living artist who broke through that wall of antiquity.

Jerry Uelsmann, detail   ©2022 Elizabeth Fram, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 12 x 9 inches. Working on these portraits is such good practice – but so humbling. I’m learning how important it is not to rush through the drawing phase. If I lay out the drawing and then leave it to come back to later, time and space make it easier to see where adjustments are needed.

Looking back, his work definitely had a formative impact on me. While I was intrigued by the ideology of the Dada movement and iconic surrealists like Dali, I found it hard to connect with much of their work. Jerry Uelsmann was a contemporary exception; his imagery spoke to me and stayed with me. His “artful juxtapositions”, as his NY Times obituary termed them, were both approachable and curious. Looking back, I think it was Uelsmann’s photo montages that first nudged me toward grasping the importance of looking for and creating unexpected connections.

I’ve always loved this image. This old dorm room poster is tacked to my office wall, where I still enjoy it every day.

The mystical quality of his photos pulled me in, appealing to my college-age self by feeding the desire to find meaning that comes with growing into adulthood. Yet even all these years later, his images still touch on something fundamental.

Electric Milk © Elizabeth Fram, Watercolor on paper, 30 x 22 inches. This ancient painting (c. 1979) was inspired by the surrealistic objective to defy reason and Uelsmann’s example of combining disparate objects.

Intellectually, the intent behind his imagery still remains just out of reach, but one can understand enough of his visual language to feel encouraged that translation is possible — perhaps through the vocabulary of dreams. The various elements within each finished image have enough relatability to give the resulting montages an essence of personal relevance despite their mystery. Ultimately, he poses riddles that connect to something within our deeper selves.

I still refer to this wonderful monograph for inspiration and escape.

Uelsmann was a pioneer, conjuring in the 1960s what he appropriately termed “the alchemy of the darkroom”.  Photoshop may have made that form of magic accessible on a more universal scale, but I’ve yet to find work that contains the same haunting aura of myth which makes Uelsmann’s work so memorable.