Jerry Uelsmann has spent more than half a century addressing those questions — and going emphatically, if winkingly, as far along the inner-reality side as he can get. A very extensive sampling of his answers can be found in “The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann.’’ It runs at the Peabody Essex Museum through May 13.
Part comedian, part epistemologist, Uelsmann has been called the father of Photoshop — except that none of his image manipulation is done on a computer. Taking multiple negatives, he will go into the darkroom and use his enlarger to come up with a traditional-looking black and white gelatin silver print - except that there’s nothing traditional about the subject matter.
Uelsmann practices what he calls “post-visualization.’’ He doesn’t take a picture hoping it will duplicate what he has seen through a viewfinder. That would be “previsualization,’’ to use the term Ansel Adams made famous. Instead, he takes his pictures and considers how they might be combined, after the fact, to become his ultimate image. What Yosemite was for Adams, or the street for Garry Winogrand, the darkroom is for Uelsmann: his artistic home, the stage where he best practices his artistry. “As far as I’m concerned,’’ Uelsmann has said, “the darkroom is truly capable of being a visual research laboratory, a place of discovery, observation, and meditation.’’
Like Duane Michals or Jeff Wall, Uelsmann stages his photographs. The difference is that the staging takes place in his head rather than before the camera. Certain subjects recur throughout the show - lips, trees, women (often unclothed), hands, water, shorelines, animals - but what Uelsmann does with them is never predictable (other than in its unpredictability).
