Water (Part 2)

How I love to look at the mysterious and beguiling photographs of Jerry Uelsmann (www.uelsmann.net). Each composition, as I’ve written here before, tells a story in both symbolic and allegorical terms as he takes seemingly disparate elements from different photographs and seamlessly merges them into a whole. I gave a link to one of his pictures in my first entry on “Water.” And I think it is just puzzling enough to arouse both that sense of mystery and awe, but also troubling enough to disturb our first peaceful impressions of what we are seeing. There are varous ways to approach this vision of his (www.uelsmann.com/images/Figure.html). I tried to weave my interpretation into that earlier entry, but I think I only partly succeeded.

Then, I read this comment by Vine Deloria in an interview in The Sun: Indians’ beliefs about their origins vary considerably from tribe to tribe. Many tribes simply begin their story at a certain location and describe their migrations. Others will say they came from another continent by boat…A number of tribes say that they were created here. A few say them came here through a portal from another world. They walked into a cave or tunnel, for example, and it was completely dark, and they continued walking until a tiny light appeared ahead of them. As they kept mvoing toward it, it grew bigger, gradually revealing itself to be an entrance into a new world.

So, while the entrance to the tunnel the man is facing is dark, light shimmers on the water in which he is walking, and through the vegetation above. One can believe the light has its source farther along the course of the waterway through the tunnel. But I like Deloria’s way of explaining something Uelsmann has vividly expressed by means of his overlapping and juxtaposed images.

In fact, the interview was illustrated with several striking Uelsmann images. Two of them are a short sequence and take place at the edge of the ocean, that endless body of water integral to Uelsmann’s various symbolic visions in which he describes the world he sees. The first photograph is of a ladder joining a point of light on the ocean just offshore with an infinity point of light centered in the upper third of the composition. Two figures are on the water, but not in it, on either side of the ladder, one nearby and one slightly farther off in the distance. The next composition is of the same scene, but the lower part of the photograph shows two footprints in the sand, and the same ladder off in the distance leading up to the source of light in the sky. And in this setting the two figures are gone. There is only the surf, and a few gentle waves reaking onshore. Soon, the footprints will be erased by the encroaching surf.

In the last sequence of the three related compositions I am describing that appear in the magazine, there is a starfish in the center of the picture, just above the footprints.

Mysterious. I like to imagine what Uelsmann was thinking when he produced these images.