Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.
Through June 30
If only Jerry Uelsmann had begun his career in the Photoshop era, said William Meyers in The Wall Street Journal. A half-century ago, this pioneering American photographer began producing strikingly surreal pictures whose effects were born in the darkroom: trees and boulders hovering in the air, women’s bodies morphing into streams, a hamburger replacing a setting sun. When viewing the photographs in “The Mind’s Eye,” the Peabody Essex Museum’s new retrospective, it’s difficult not to think about how the images Uelsmann created through painstaking labor could be produced today with just a few clicks of a mouse. In fact, his techniques helped cultivate the vocabulary of today’s digital photo manipulation. Yet Uelsmann also possessed something no computer program can duplicate—an “ability to envision images that are totally impossible” but that somehow strike the eye as being “absolutely right.”
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You might call Uelsmann an inner realist, said Mark Feeney in The Boston Globe. He seeks to capture not surface, visual reality but some more intangible emotional or psychological reality. Yet his playfulness can lead him astray. The hamburger-as-sun image, titled All American Sunset (1971), is at best a flat joke. But Full Dome (1973), which turns the Half Dome mountain in Yosemite National Park into a perfectly symmetrical geological wonder, works as both an Ansel Adams spoof and a beautiful landscape photograph. The Dive, a 1967 image that shows us a diver in midair above a splash of water, also richly rewards the viewer’s eye, even as it raises questions about our concepts about sequence and time. “One of Uelsmann’s great virtues” is that once he has confronted you with a good question, “he lets you supply the answers.”
