Published by Bulfinch in 2005, Jerry Uelsmann’s Other Realities gathers a personal selection of photographs made from the early 1960s through the time of publication. Across 112 pages, the book presents Uelsmann’s sustained reconsideration of what a photographic image can describe. Peter C. Bunnell’s accompanying essay places the work within a broader history of photography without diminishing its psychological ambiguity.

Uelsmann began combining multiple negatives in the late 1950s, departing from the dominant photographic aesthetics of that period. His pictures were constructed in the darkroom through layered negatives and combination printing rather than assembled with digital software. The distinction is historically important: these seamless, improbable compositions anticipated the altered photographic worlds that later became commonplace, while remaining grounded in enlarger, exposure and printmaking craft.

The resulting images occupy an uncertain territory between observed fact and mental projection. Bodies, interiors, landscapes and objects enter relationships that could not exist before a camera in ordinary space. Their surreal logic recalls strands of thought associated with René Magritte, Carl Jung and Man Ray, yet Uelsmann’s method is distinctly photographic. Familiar detail retains the authority of the lens even as the complete scene resists literal explanation.

For a serious photobook collection, the volume’s significance rests on the conjunction of concentrated selection, historical span and critical context. It allows Uelsmann’s images to be read not as isolated technical feats but as a coherent inquiry pursued over decades. This first-edition hardcover also records, in substantial monographic form, an analogue practice that altered the expressive possibilities of photographic montage well before digital manipulation reshaped the medium.