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Before Photoshop there was …

By Noah Buchan
STAFF REPORTER
Wednesday, Oct 22, 2008, Page 15

EXHIBITION NOTES WHAT: Whispers of Blended Shadows: The Art of Jerry Uelsmann WHERE: Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), 3C exhibition areas (3C展區), 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路3段181號) WHEN: Tuesdays through Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm. Until Jan. 11 next year ENTRY: NT$30 general admission ON THE NET: www.tfam.museum

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Before the invention of software programs like Photoshop, photographers often viewed the clicking of the shutter as the end of the creative process. For Jerry Uelsmann, it was always the beginning. The American photographer spends most of his time in the darkroom manipulating the images he takes, transforming them into works of irrational beauty. A sampling of roughly 100 works spanning Uelsmann’s half-century artistic career is on view at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Judging by the crowds of people lined up to view the images last week, Uelsmann has a respectable following in Taiwan. This, perhaps, is unsurprising in a population of digitally literate amateur photographers who snap images of nature or people and then place them, sometimes manipulated, on their blogs.

But don’t expect cutesy or pedestrian photographs in this exhibit. Uelsmann’s visual syntax reaches deep into the human subconscious and surfaces with images that juxtapose incidental objects onto a visual landscape that is surrealist in its composition.

Uelsmann’s process of creating photographs sets him apart from proponents of straight photography such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, photographers whose style was influential during the last half of the 20th century. The creative tool for these realist photographers was the camera itself, where, for example, a small aperture setting would be used to secure great depth of field to record and accurately recreate the human figure, plants or landscapes.

Uelsmann’s primary tools for creation are found in the darkroom. Employing several enlargers, he sandwiches multiple negatives together and in the process creates emotionally and psychologically powerful silver-gelatin (black-and-white) prints containing easily recognizable images — clouds, a rowboat or waterfall — which are then juxtaposed to create an irrational visual order.

The prints chosen for the TFAM exhibition emphasize the relationship between the natural world of trees, rocks and water and the world created by humans. One photograph features a dense forest enclosing a rustic study with its books, wooden tables, shelves and chairs. Another image shows the head of what appears to be a Greek sculpture lying vertically in a bed of rocks. The juxtaposition of the natural creates an interesting meditation on the relationship between nature and humanity. In most of these images, it is the human creations that are decaying and in the process of returning to the natural world.

Memory, shifting and illusive, is an evident theme in some of the images. Two hands hold up an open book where a woman’s face is indistinctly etched on to the surface of a page. A small window with prison bars separates the black inner sanctum with the illuminated external world, which is only vaguely apparent in the distance — as if to suggest that humans are prisoners and the woman’s image fades with the passing of time.

The majority of the works are untitled. Those that are labeled provide a hint to where Uelsmann’s influence comes from. Titles such as Memories of Max Ernst, Homage to Duchamp, Homage to Man Ray and Magritte’s Touchstone suggest Uelsmann’s visual vocabulary is inspired by painters — especially the gravity-defying images of the surrealists — rather than photographers.

Curiously, the only photographer mentioned in this exhibit is the French master Eugene Atget who sold his photographs to artists (a practice common at the turn of the 19th century). Uelsmann reverses this tradition by drawing on the works of abstract and surrealist masters and yet manages to create a visual world that is all his own.

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