Uelsmann/Yosemite by Jerry N. Uelsmann brings together black-and-white photomontages developed through repeated visits to Yosemite National Park, California, from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, including a 1992 artist-in-residence appointment.
Uelsmann said Yosemite's strong presence turned the struggle for a personal vision into an event that was introspective and challenging. He had first worked in the park teaching workshops with Ansel Adams, and the montages set close, unpredictable scenes against the controlled, distantly viewed landscape associated with Adams. Uelsmann called his photographs "obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious." Later scholarship has read their fusions of bodies with trees, rivers, and mountains as images of death, renewal, and fertility.
Across the photographs, familiar scenery becomes improbable but visually coherent. Rocks float, clocks and flamingos enter the landscape, and nude figures move through rapids. A covered vehicle sits among trees, a waterfall turns into roots, and a boulder bears a wooden door. The black-and-white compositions use continuous tonal transitions and carefully aligned edges to make incompatible elements share one pictorial space. That seamlessness lets an image register first as plausible, then as comic, dreamlike, or ominous.
The visual continuity was produced through film-based, analog darkroom photomontage. Uelsmann combined multiple negatives and, for his Yosemite constructions, could use as many as twelve enlargers. His established process moved one sheet of photographic paper among enlargers for sequential exposures, using masks, burning, dodging, and repeated tests to control scale, placement, and blending. He accumulated negatives over time and composed during printing, allowing an unexpected resemblance or new combination to redirect the image.
University Press of Florida published the book in 1996, presenting Uelsmann's first volume organized around a single landscape theme. Its public counterpart, Yosemite/A Personal Vision, was shown at the Yosemite Museum's Fine Arts Gallery the same year. Yosemite images were later included in LANDMARK: Yosemite Through the Lens of Contemporary Landscape Photography, shown at the Yosemite Museum in 2016-17, the Merced and Mariposa arts centers in 2017, and SF Camerawork through January 2018.
