Jerry N. Uelsmann’s *Referencing Art* gathers photographs made across five decades around a precise concern: the artist’s sustained conversation with works and ideas that shaped his imagination. Published by Nazraeli Press in 2004, this compact, 64-page volume presents a less familiar perspective on Uelsmann’s practice, treating the history of art not as a fixed canon but as material for continued visual thought.

The references extend across photography, painting, sculpture, Surrealism, and conceptual art. Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Ansel Adams, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder are among the figures invoked. Yet these pictures are not reproductions or scholarly illustrations. Uelsmann absorbs particular artistic encounters into his own image-making, using the possibilities of photomontage to transform recognition into association. Homage becomes an active method: a way to test affinities across periods and media while maintaining the internal logic of his own photographs.

A five-page essay, “Imagination and the Image,” by Alex Alberro and Nora M. Alter accompanies the work. Its presence gives the book a critical framework without displacing Uelsmann’s personal account of influence. The resulting structure is both retrospective and thematic, drawing together images from a long span of activity according to the artists, movements, and visual propositions with which he felt an enduring rapport.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this concentrated view of influence as part of photographic practice. Rather than offering a broad career survey, *Referencing Art* isolates one recurrent strand in Uelsmann’s work and makes it legible across decades. It is therefore valuable not only as a study of his photomontage, but also as a carefully bounded inquiry into how one photographer looks at art history—gratefully, critically, and through the act of making new images.