Art News

Peabody Essex Museum presents retrospective of pioneering photographer Jerry Uelsmann

SALEM, MA.- Beautiful and surreal, funny and provocative, the photographs of Jerry Uelsmann are icons of American photo history. The Peabody Essex Museum presents the first retrospective of Uelsmann’s work in over 30 years. The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann features 90 works spanning the artist’s celebrated and wide-ranging career, with well-known works shown alongside never-before-seen recent images. As a pioneer of contemporary photography and master of experimental darkroom technique, Uelsmann has continuously pushed the creative and technical boundaries of photography, revealing new visual possibilities and critical considerations for the medium. In the late 1950s, Uelsmann began experimenting with multiple enlargers and advanced masking, diffusing, burning and dodging techniques, to create imaginary images in the darkroom decades before the advent of Photoshop. Uelsmann’s ingenious work references Surr