Light Year Mind Theory

What's In A Dream

Our dreams are abstract and fleeting to the degree of a fog lifting in the morning sun. Somewhere on the tip of our subconscious and our waking life sits these elusive memories of images so surreal, vague, and profound that our minds can not seem to grasp them. These dreams portray countless amounts of information through-out our REM state during sleep that most of us can only remember little glimpses of. If only we could capture and recreate just a hint of this dream world, what would it look like? If we were to look for images that remotely provoke reminders of this state of consciousness, we would look towards Jerry Uelsmann.

Jerry Uelsmann is a contemporary photographer that uses composites of several photos to obtain dream-like imagery in black and white. The technique that he uses to achieve his composite images is completely done with a dark room and multiple negatives. Uelsmann pulls from hundreds of negatives that he has photographed and kept throughout his career as a photographer to put together his finished images.

Uelsmann got interested in photography at the age of 14 while attending public school in 1948(Jerry Uelsmann). From an interview with Shutterbug, Uelsmann speaks of starting photography as a part time wedding photographer in high school and how photography was viewed as more of a hobby saying “Photography as art had just not received a lot of acceptance” He also states in the same interview that when he first started his composites as a graduate student that “...people questioned if my work was really even photography” saying such things as, “It's very, very interesting, but it's not photography”(Master Interview; Jerry Uelsmann | Shutterbug). From 1955 to 1960 he attended college at Rochesters Institute of Technology earning a B.F.A. and an M.A., then finally a master degree in fine arts from the University of Indiana (Jerry Uelsmann). He then went on to become a teacher for photography at the University of Forida in 1960. He has now since retired. “Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years”(BIOGRAPHY). He has also been published in hundreds of articles, books, and magazines. One of these publications is Uelsmann, Process and Perception.

This book contains images from a small portfolio of his works from 1980-1985, none of which are titled, only dated. In the first chapter in this book called “Techniques” Uelsmann describes his process when approaching his works and refers to his darkroom “as a visual research laboratory”. He uses upwards to eight enlargers to set up a sort of one man factory and will put out around 150 finished images in one setting. He then comes away with roughly fifteen that he feels satisfied enough with to keep (Uelsmann).

In many ways this process is a lot like our dreams, beings that in one night you may have several dreams, forgetting most of them and only being able to remember minor fleeting impressions of what they were when you wake. So, in this sense, the dreams you forget are the ones he nonchalantly tosses away and the dreams you recall are the ones he ends up keeping and sharing with the world. What's in a dream? I am more than certain Jerry Uelsmann would like to show you.