JERRY N. UELSMANN

To make photography able to create images evoking thoughts and dreams. To reveal what the eye cannot see, because what really matters is not to represent the existent, but to tell the impossible. To climb the barriers between observation and imagination…

Starting from the Sixties, a group of authors revolutionize photography: their aim is not to document the reality, but to go beyond it, retying together the threads that could unite imagination and vision, visible and invisible. Between these authors Jerry Uelsmann, who’s able to create images that are bringing us on the threshold of a mythical and dreamlike reality.

Uelsmann has declared that his creative process does not start in the obscurity of the dark room, but on the contrary in contact with the landscapes, walking and observing the natural features on which he would come across along the way: a rock, a waterfall, a solitary lake, a sky scattered by clouds… When he enters his large dark room he does not limit himself at printing sharp images, he combines instead various negatives, shot maybe at different times and places, until he achieves the creation of a magical and mysterious universe, realistic and dreamlike simultaneously. Resembling an antique alchemist, who was matching and blending together natural elements to transmute them, Uelsmann combines and superimposes different images, exploiting a knowledge lacked by the vast majority of photographers, while letting himself to be driven by phantasy, by the need to experiment and transfigure the reality, up to the point where it would represent itself disguised as an enigmatic. His images, born in darkness and silence, crossed by unconscious or preconscious emotions, are loading themselves with a vertiginous quietness, are abolishing the time itself, suspending it in an enigmatic space.