Jerry Olsman, the photographer who deftly used darkroom techniques to manipulate his black and white photos into a surreal montage that had been expected for many years and revolutionized digital photo editing by Adobe Photoshop, died on April 4 in Gainesville, Florida. He was 87 years old.
His son Andrew said the cause was complications from a stroke.
Mr. Olsmann's dream-like portraits seem to ignore the laws of gravity and rationality, as did René Magritte's paintings.
In Mr. Ulsman's fictional alternate universe, boats float above clouds and waterfalls. Hands turning from a tree trunk gently hold a bird's nest. Five empty chairs are magically placed on a pond facing a fifth chair, as if they were having a meeting. A young naked woman on her lower body was just a misty mist hovering over the mountains.
“The primary creative gesture for most photographers was to tap the shutter button,” Mr. Uelsmann (pronounced YULES-man) told Smithsonian magazine in 2013. But I realized that the darkroom was a visual research laboratory where the creative process could continue."
To choose which photos to collect, he combed through piles of his contact papers from years past.
"I'm starting to see how the photos can fit together," he said in a 2011 interview with The New York Times' Lens Blog. "There's a kind of realization. I'm going to work on a picture, and I'm going to remember a picture I took 20 years ago or 15 years ago. I have to find the negativity that I think might fit into that context."
Working in his darkroom with up to seven magnifiers, each carrying a different negative, Mr. Uelsmann transferred a photographic sheet from magnifier to magnifier. He infused an element different from each negative, creating a light installation that can be filled with paradox, wonder, and symbolism. Sometimes it takes days to make a print to your liking.
"If I had an end goal, it would be to amaze myself," Mr Olsman told The Times.
Photography critic Philip Gefter wrote in an email that Mr. Olsmann "brilliantly put his highly accurate images of actual objects side by side, creating an extraordinary contrast with Surrealist influences."
"His intentions were entirely symbolic and based on psychological models of a Jungian nature," Gefter added.
Mr. Uelsmann's work has been widely shown in the United States and Europe. In New York, it was included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2012 exhibition "Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop" which traveled to other cities. One of his montages on the show was a small Victorian study with its ceiling open to the sky, and on a desk, a little man was walking on a map. (Mr. Olsmann photographed the man walking on the beach.)
Mia Feynman, who organized the show, said of Mr Olsmann in a phone interview: “He was outside the mainstream in the photographic art industry, which really had an emphasis on the purity of the straight image and the idea of rendering - that's a step where a photographer has to be able to visualize print The final moment you click the shutter. He went against it all.”
Jerry Norman Olsman was born on June 11, 1934 in Detroit. His father, Norman, owned a grocery store, where Jerry worked as a delivery boy. His mother, Florence (Crossman) Olsman, was a homemaker. At the age of 12, Jerry began taking drawing lessons at the Detroit Institute of Art Museum, where he became fascinated by Van Gogh's "self-portrait."
In high school he worked as a photographer for the student newspaper and worked in a photography studio.
When he attended Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York, his goal was to become a portrait photographer. But under the influence of educators such as photographer Minor White (who called the camera a "transformation machine," Mr. Olsmann said), he began to see a wider world of photography.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1957, Mr. Olsman received his MA in Audio-Visual Communication and MA in Photography from Indiana University in 1960.
From 1960 to 1998, he studied photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Early on, in a group darkroom there, he first used multiple magnifiers, an innovative approach that sped up the creation of photomontages. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 1967, the year he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
John Szarkowski, famed director of MoMA's photography department, once said in an interview with The Daily News of New York that Mr. Uelsmann dared question the finality of the photograph once it was taken.
“He meditates on his photographs, tests printing techniques, and recombines the images, and the result is truly artistic and new,” said Mr. Szarkowski.
Mr. Uelsmann's books and studies include "Uelsmann: Process and Perception" (1985); "Silver Reflections" (1988) and "Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective" (2014, with Carol McCusker).
Describing Mr. Uelsmann's home studio in Gainesville in "Uelsmann Untitled," Mrs. McCusker wrote that its walls were "hung with cartoons, doll heads, strange toys that move or speak, and three-dimensional sculptures of Hieronymus Bosch and Victoria from the nineteenth century," and that its shelves were filled with With camera memorabilia and mug shots and utensils—which seemed to form a chorus 'silently encouraging or inspiring his next creation'.
In addition to his son, Mr. Olsmann, who died in the nursing home, he is survived by two grandchildren. His marriage to Marilyn Schlott, Diane Faris, and Maggie Taylor ended in divorce.
Mr. Uelsmann recognized the benefits of using Photoshop, developed by Adobe in the late 1980s, but chose not to give up on his analog art. He used a computer, but only for email.
"If I had been 22, I would probably have worked in Photoshop," he told The Times.
Photoshop seemed to appreciate it. In 2013, his Twitter account shared an article about Mr Uelsmann's manipulation of photos with a message saying, Jerry Olsman's amazing vehicles We mentioned that imagination is everything."
His ex-wife Ms. Taylor, a digital artist who uses Photoshop, noted that Adobe approached Mr. Uelsmann in the mid-1980s to create a poster image to promote a new version of Photoshop.
It was an introduction to the program. Adobe erased some of his negatives and sent an expert to help him create a final composite of clouds resting in the palm of his hands while a rowboat floats unattended in nearby water. He decided which items would be placed, but he didn't know how to use the program.
"He loved the photo and decided to move the negatives into a darkroom and recreate them with photography," Ms Taylor wrote in an email. “Working in a dark, damp room was an integral part of his creative process; sitting at a desk was not his.”
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