Jerry Uelsmann

I chose this photo by Jerry Uelsmann because I just loved how he took something so mundane and created a whole new perspective. This black and white photograph depicts a room with a sky as its ceiling. The sky is filled with puffy clouds with sun shining through directly on the desk in the room. He takes this living room scene that almost looks like what a room in a dollhouse would look like. It is a very fancy living room with wooden walls, a fireplace, a desk and a book case. As you look up, there is no ceiling or roof over the room, but a sky. It is just open to the world. A bird sits on the desk representing the way in which the room is open to nature and the environment outside. He took a photo of the sky and placed it as this living room’s roof/ceiling. With the merging of these two photos, comes an amazing and very interesting montage. I love how simple it is. He is not trying to do anything crazy or drastic with this montage. He just wants to represent the way in which we close off nature with the walls we build. The sky ceiling adds a powerful element to the photograph and opens the photo up. Without the sky in the composition, it would just be a boring old living room with fancy things in it. This montage allows for the photograph to come alive and really engage the viewer. This inspires me to use a similar technique with my montage project. I want to take an idea or scene that is simple and combine it with something that makes it come alive. I just really like how this photograph looks compositionally and the way in which he chose to merge the two. This montage looks very real because this is what it would look like if we had rooms without ceilings.

https://www.uelsmann.net/works.php