60 - words of wisdom..

It's a marvel to listen to or read what -those who do what they do with love- say about their occupation. There in between their lines you can feel their love. Even more, there is incredible insights in what they tell you.

Jerry Uelsmann is a master and a professor of photography and we are in the fellowship of being Floridians as for the moment. Anyway, as you can tell, I am not a very serious writer. So I will leave you with an excerpt from an interview with him. He is explaining how he found himself doing what he's been doing for many years and apparently is famous for.

"... there are all kinds of little clues that may prompt you to investigate areas that will yield fruitful results. This was a case where my initial motive was to try to do something better than another photographer had done. When I was a student of Henry's (Henry Holmes Smith), there was this exhibit, Photographer's Choice, that had in it an Arthur Segal photograph of a nude (superimposed) on a highway. She fell in with the horizon line, but she'd been photographed standing against a dark doorway and you could still see the hinges. When I saw this, I thought it was just poorly done. I said: "I can do it better." Henry, who was an explosive teacher, was very critical of me being critical of Arthur Segal's photograph. My initial motive to try some of these manipulative things came from trying to do this thing better. Within two or three days, I forgot what I was trying to do better and I got all excited about the process. Now I believe that any motive that can get you working is essentially a good one. Once in the process of doing the work you may lose the sense of what the initial thrust is and you get involved in the process itself. When things are right, you're relaxed and trying things and you're open to the moment. You're not hanging on to what the initial agenda was. I guess this has a little to do with previsualization and postvisualization. If you go into the darkroom with the agenda that you want a specific thing to happen, then anything that happens different from that becomes a mistake. The point would be that if you're open to accidental or spontaneous events, and you can give up your total fixation with the expected result, you may have all kinds of results that might be equally satisfying or even more satisfying.
...."

If you would like to experience, his photographs are in the permanent collections of Metropolitan, MOMA, Int. Museum of Photography at the G. Eastman House, Bibliotheque National in Paris, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and many other museums around the world. They also appear in his book, Jerry Uelsmann: Other Realities (Bulfinch Press, New York, 2005).

Photograph displayed is a work by the artist.. The technique is not photoshop...

www.uelsmann.net