Jerry Uelsmann: Photo Synthesis

Photographs create a surrealistic mood by seamlessly combining and overlapping images

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.

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