Faking It: Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor
Jerry Uelsmann is a giant of surreal photomontage — in the 1960s, he was a leading figure in the new field of Pop photography. And he still works in that labor-intensive way. “I’ve had images that I’ve worked on for two or three weeks in the darkroom,” he tells Kurt Andersen. “You know that the idea is a viable one but you’re not quite sure how to resolve it visually.” Uelsmann’s work is featured in the exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the late 90s, a representative from Adobe Photoshop approached Uelsmann, asking if he’d create an image on their new software. He did – once – but didn’t cotton to the technology. His wife, photographer Maggie Taylor, latched on to it. She creates her surreal photomontage almost exclusively on a computer. “I love sitting at a desk and working, I’m kind of nerdy about things,” she says. “The idea of using the computer and being able to manipulate the images more and get exactly what I wanted for a still life image was something that immediately appealed to me.”
Uelsmann admits he’s sometimes a little jealous of the tools at Taylor's fingertips. But “I don’t think art is a competitive sport,” he says. Photography is “another system for making marks on paper. If you do it with a computer, if you do it in the darkroom, there’s a variety of ways of doing it — it’s not like one is better than the other.”
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Video: Manipulating Photography
