Points of Intervention: Maggie Taylor & Jerry Uelsmann
Jan - Feb, 2002
About
Jerry
Uelsmann’s photographs are as immediately recognizable
as they are visually potent. He has become one of the most
successful photographic artists of the last thirty years and
remains a pioneer within the field. Uelsmann’s work has
been exhibited in over 100 solo exhibitions and his photographs
are in the permanent collections of many major museums worldwide,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International
Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the National
Museum of American Art in Washington, and the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, to list a few. Utilizing only traditional
darkroom techniques (and up to eight enlargers), Uelsmann
manipulates and combines familiar images and landscapes into
unfamiliar creations that conjure up notions of surrealism,
mysticism and even Jungian archetypes. It has been said of
his work, “The visually plausible but philosophically
impossible situations presented in Jerry Uelsmann’s photographs
contradict the essential information we have come to expect
from photographs. By subverting the currency of literal fact,
Uelsmann releases us from the constraints of photography’s
mimetic function. No longer burdened by representation, we
naturally return to our internal, nonlinear faculties of thought
and feeling to savor the inexpressible resonance of his…
visions.”
From
a technological standpoint the work of Maggie
Taylor could not be more different from that of Uelsmann.
For the past five years she has been using a flatbed scanner
instead of a traditional camera to record and interpret collected
objects, text and images. These are combined through digital
manipulations, as well as being physically constructed on
the scanner. The resulting inscrutable creations of Taylor
had a distinct resonance with the photographs of Uelsmann.
Also widely exhibited and collected, Maggie Taylor’s
work is beginning to gain national and international acclaim.
When describing her unique tableaux Taylor suggests, “the
images work on two levels: they are about these specific objects,
yet they also invite reverie or recollections. I like to think
that the objects are obviously symbolic, but not symbolically
obvious.”
