Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

When Uelsmann began his career in the late 1950s, fine-art photography was dominated by the documentary tradition of Walker Evans and the purist aesthetic of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the West Coast School. Today, the photomontage - the composite image generated in the darkroom by multiple printing technqiues that employ several negatives - has become an accepted art form, and Uelsmann is the modern master of it. This collection of the best of his images created over the past 35 years documents his seminal contribution to 20th century art. Uelsmann's technique of merging disparate images produces seamless, surreal compositions as emotionally and psychologically allusive as they are technically flawless.

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Publishers Weekly Review

In an enlightening, authoritative foreword to this retrospective collection of Uelsmann's radical photo art, Coleman, who teaches at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, cites photomontages of 19th-century sentimentalists and Dadaists of the 1920s as important precursors to Uelsmann's work--the intermanipulation of two or more pre-imaged negatives to produce a single ``post-visualized'' print. As seen here in seamless cohesion, improbably matched images ``appear integral to the depicted scene.'' In a reverse kinship of form, four hands softly entwined contrast with four rocks suspended and forbodingly separate in mid-air; individual orbed faces are either hand-held or framed in a geographer's globe; a tiny human figure climbs the slope of a tilted drafting-board in a richly paneled chamber open to the sky. Uelsmann's originality is impressive. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Since the late 1960s, Uelsmann, recipient of many honors and numerous one-person exhibitions, has been recognized as one of the most innovative art photographers working in this country. As a teacher he has also made a contribution to the field. His use of photomontage (the combining of several photographic negatives in the printing to make a single image) has helped to extend the range of contemporary photographic expression in a profound manner. This book is a compilation of more than 100 of his pictures dating from 1959 to 1991, images that express deep-seated feelings of personal identity, location, and sexuality. The informative foreword is by A.D. Coleman, a critic for the New York Observer and a columnist for several international periodicals. The second book of Uelsmann's work published by the University of Florida Press (the first being Process and Perception, 1985) the present monograph is one of several devoted to his work. Many of the images in the present book are new and have not been reproduced before; and here, unlike in his earlier books, where the arrangement is chronological, they are paired and sequenced by theme, concept, or subject matter, and the two adjacent images may date years apart. The reproductions are excellent and so is the design and format. Stimulating and provocative, this is a key monograph on a critically important contemporary photographic artist. P. C. Bunnell Princeton University

Booklist Review

The master of the combined photograph in which one negative is seamlessly blended into another, Uelsmann can be called both the creator of a classic method and possibly its last great practitioner. Digitized blends have already taken over most of the turf that Uelsmann pioneered, but he still makes every image--sometimes from six or seven negatives--laboriously, one at a time, in his darkroom. His subjects vary, but in many of his works, as foreword scribe A. D. Coleman perceptively notes, there is a shadowy male figure searching "convoluted, mysterious, multidimensional scapes pervasively animated by the Feminine." Although critics often emphasize Jungian analysis of Uelsmann's symbols, his work is not theory-driven but seems to arise spontaneously from an exceptionally fertile, creative mind. This collection has three signal virtues to recommend it: Coleman's essay, which places Uelsmann's work in the long tradition of photomontage; the superb, crisp clarity of the reproductions; and, most important, 40 new images by the master himself. (Reviewed Nov. 1, 1992)0813011590Gretchen Garner