My Photography

Homage to Jerry Uelsmann

For my media arts class we were told to pick a well known photographer who inspired us by the photos they took. I picked Jerry Uelsmann, because I think it's interesting how he puts two pictures, of way different things, and put them together and created a whole new intersting picture.

Jerry Uelsmann was a late 1900's photographer, who had a whole different vision of photography. He inspired my views on the way I see the world and how I take photographs. I plan to pay homage to him and his photography by creating my own creative photography using the same concept he used. For example he would take a photo of something that looks lifeless (right photo) and mirror image it to show how it looked or would look with life.

I also plan to take pictures with one person thats kind of distant in the photo or has a silhouette, because I've noticed Uelsmann uses women in a lot of his photos. He also uses alot of nature, which to me suggests that he respects women and nature.

Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann was born June 11, 1934 in Detroit. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and received a B.F.A degree in 1957. He later got a M.S and M.F.A degree at Indiana University in 1960. He then decided to teach photography, in 1960, at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In 1967, Jerry Uelsmann had a solo exhibit at The Museum Of Modern Arts. Uelsmann is very good at using the printer to produce composite photographs with multiple negatives and extensive darkroom work. He used a variety of enlargers to produce the expected effects.

Jerry Uelsmann uses many negatives to create surreal images of landscapes that interweave trees, rocks, water and human beings. Because of his creative imagination, Uelsmann's photographs have been exhibited in more than 100 solo shows and are in permanent collections of many museums. The museums include The Metropolitan Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, The International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan and many more.

Jerry Uelsmann photography has influenced the way I see photos now. I feel that I want to be able to make photography more interesting like the ones Uelsmann has created. His photography opened my eyes to a whole new art of photo taking and capturing images that aren't actually real.

American Photography History

American photography began as getting a picture painted. Since the 1900's Americans created the first camera, brownie-box camera. For 80 years the brownie was used all over America to capture images people never want to forget. Soon photo montage's were created, where you can take a picture and make something in it appear real. Before you could put pictures in a book, you had to glue them in one by one. In 1980 they developed a way to print pictures on paper and were then able to make books faster and newspapers better. 

Cameras weren't just used to capture images of the good things, but also to capture the bad. People wanted to see the real world, what's behind every door. They got to see pictures of celebrities and how they actually live their lives behind all the fame. They also got to see stuff like natural disasters and how those who were poor lived. They also seen pictures of dead people and people who were hurt. Photographers also took pictures of children who were being over worked with low pay.

Over the years cameras have developed in a way that's changed history as American's see it. With all the technology  that's been created we are able to take clear pictures and upload them so the world can see them.