When I was a kid, photography used to be a more trusted medium. It was analog rather than digital. Light exposed film coated in photo sensitive chemicals and created an image that was then printed to paper. Photography was considered to be truth. It was thought to be impossible to fake, or to lie with photography.
Then Jerry Uelsmann came along and made images like this:
Floating trees? A mirror mountain landscape? Pea pod sea monsters? HOW CAN THIS BEEEEEE?!?!?
It isn’t. Uelsmann built this image by combining multiple images. But he didn’t drag them onto a computer screen, he did this in a darkroom with photo paper, photo enlargers, film and light. Click the image above to see a gallery of other Uelsmann images and read an interview with the artist from the Lens blog at the New York Times.
How many things can you pick out of this image that aren’t quite right? I count 6. Check out Jerry N. Uelsmann’s other images. Which is your favorite?
More Info
- Analog cameras exposed Photographic Film which captured the image
- The film is a small rectangle only 35mm from corner to corner. To get a bigger image, it is placed in a Photo enlarger and projected onto photo paper.
- Since photo paper and film changes if exposed to light, it must be handled in a Darkroom.
- What does analog mean?
- analog photography is when light and chemicals creates a physical recording of a real scene. If you look at developed film, it may look a little funny, but it still looks like the scene.
- What does digital mean?
- Digital photography is when light triggers a sensor to collect information in the form of 1s and 0s. Many millions of points of light are recorded and a computer interprets this data as color, light and dark and builds the image on the screen. If you were to look at the digital information, it would look like a bunch of code and numbers, not like the scene at all.
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