Jerry Uelsmann is an American photographer known for his work on photo-montage, and it has been said that his work inspired many elements of Adobe’s ‘Photoshop’ image editing software. Uelsmann focused on surrealist images created by layering film on top of one another in a dark room. Uelsmann was born and raised in Detroit in 1934 and became interested in photography as a hobby in high school when he was 14 and used it as a way to escape from his school life, where he was getting poor grades. He managed to land a few modeling and wedding shoots and began working as a part time photo assistant for a commercial studio and wedding photographer, then eventually went on to earn a BA from the Rochester Institute of Technology and M.S. and M.F.A. degrees from Indiana University. Uelsmann was a driving force of surrealist photography and was a pioneer of collage and multiple imaging in photography.

These photos are still fairly difficult to create in today’s times, and you have to know your way around Photoshop to even begin a process like this, yet Uelsmann was creating these pictures well before the invention of Photoshop, using a range of unconventional techniques, he managed to create flawlessly realized and executed images working with multiple enlargers, negatives and an array of highly-refined masking, diffusion, burning and dodging techniques.  it was after graduating from Indiana University in 1960 and embarking upon a teaching career at the University of Florida that this experimentation really took off. Uelsmann had his first solo show at MOMA in 1967, and is currently the subject of two major retrospective shows. “The Mind’s Eye,” featuring approximately 90 images (including early documentary images dating from the mid-’50s), opens at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts in February 2012 after having debuted this summer at the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where Uelsmann taught photography for close to 40 years.