TAKING THE PHOTOGRAPH INTO AN ART

Although he began his career with thoughts of doing commercial portraits, Jerry Uelsmann was never quite satisfied with the traditional view of photography as a literal recorder of events, people and places.

Uelsmann always believed a picture could be more--or, as he puts it, “a bit of art with mystery and provocation, something that presents a visual Rorschach test to the viewer.”

For more than a quarter of a century, Uelsmann, 53, has created just such images. It was in the early 1960s that he first set aside his profession’s usual preoccupation with capturing a scene or subject as it appeared before the camera. He has since become one of the country’s more acclaimed surrealist photographers.

His black-and-white prints (41 of them are on display at the Susan Spiritus Gallery in Newport Beach through June 20) offer a melange of disparate, but striking, visions: a girl’s face emerging from a block of knotted granite; a door opening in an immense stone perched on a hill; a monolithic cube hovering over a placid sea.

“I do things to amaze myself,” Uelsmann said in a recent telephone interview from his studio in Gainesville, Fla. “The symbolic quality comes from deep inside my psyche; it flowers there. . . . Inspiration is a mysterious thing.”

It wasn’t always so mysterious.

Uelsmann, who prefers to describe his work as “magic realism,” was on a more traditional path when he first began studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the mid-1950s. At the time, his major influences were Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, photographic pioneers who transformed realistic nature studies into sublime art.

After graduation, Uelsmann enrolled at Indiana University, where he became the protege of Henry Holmes Smith, one of American photography’s leading figures. Through Smith’s influence, Uelsmann dismissed any lingering notions of a career in the portrait studio--or of playing it straight with his subjects.

“Henry was my most important teacher, as that was probably the most important time for me to grow,” he remembered. “Henry pushed me into deep water and asked me to figure out what the images meant to me, if there was any value in seeing things the way I did.

“He was very supportive of experimentation and encouraged the surrealism in my work. I dove in from there.”

Uelsmann had little success when he first began showing his prints around the country. Critics and other photographers often denounced his work as manipulative and contrary to the widely held belief that a photograph should document reality.

“People thought my work was interesting, but that it was definitely not photography,” he recalled. “It was just too unusual, too fantastic; the purists were very offended.”

Then, in 1967, opinion began to change. He received a favorable review from a New York Times art critic who saw a handful of his prints on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. It was the start of a more accepting and encouraging attitude toward his surrealist style, Uelsmann recalls.

“That was definitely a turning point. There was still controversy, but my art was much more accepted. It was liberating, I can tell you that.”

Uelsmann now finds it ironic, even amusing, that his prints created such a furor in the 1960s. Compared to contemporary photography (“Talk about advances, people are openly painting on photographs and many don’t even look like photographs anymore.”), his prints are tame, even conservative, he said.

Tame maybe, but never ordinary. Uelsmann’s arcane imagery--created primarily by overlapping multiple negatives in the darkroom and often requiring more than four hours to develop--results in highly evocative and individual statements.

One untitled print features a naked woman floating a few feet above the incoming tide, her hair reaching out to the eddies, a dense array of fleecy clouds in the background. The photograph has a tranquil, even timeless quality, which Uelsmann said is just the ambiance he was trying to convey.

“That feeling of meditation is what I wanted, that sense of ease that comes from combining nature and man in a harmonious way.”

Man’s relationship with nature is a recurring theme in Uelsmann’s work. Trees, ocean, rocks and mountains are often juxtaposed with people in what could be taken as a compelling argument for preserving the environment because it emphasizes mankind’s less-than-dominant role in life’s natural order.

Despite the power of his symbols, Uelsmann stresses that his work is not rhetorical. “I don’t have any hidden agenda or specific point of view that tells (viewers) how to relate or what to do. I hope my work is provocative, but I don’t set out to convince anyone about anything.”

In fact, he says, it would be not only presumptuous but contrary to art’s “evocative, extremely personal” quality if his prints had a didactic focus.

“It’s really not my role to make protests. I create an experience for an audience,” he explained. “Isn’t that the artist’s goal? At least that’s how I see it.”