Hot dog for the PMA.

What on earth is a giant hot dog, complete with relish and mustard, doing floating in the sky above the Philadelphia Museum of Art? In this photograph, two tall, slender flag poles frame the classically proportioned columns and pediment of the museum, as well as the enormous, soft, squishy hot dog hovering above like a giant blimp. Is this some sort of joke? According to the artist, Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934), that is precisely what it is.

Uelsmann made this photograph to celebrate the opening of his first major museum exhibition, which was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1970. Do you think he is poking fun at himself, the museum, or both? This museum, like many American museums, schools, and libraries, is modeled on Greek temple architecture - ancient places of worship. Hot dogs are a casual food usually consumed at baseball games, picnics, or airports. Could Uelsmann be saying that his exhibition makes the museum seem less serious and dignified? Or, is he indicating that he feels so terrific about having an exhibition at the museum that he's saying, "Hot Dog!" with a picture instead of words? What else could he be telling us?

Artist Biography

Uelsmann has been a pioneer and spokesperson for the complex techniques and aesthetics of photomontage since the 1960s. (Photomontage is the process of making a composite picture by bringing together photographs or parts of photographs by overlapping or superimposing them so they form a blended whole while remaining distinct.) As an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Uelsmann was introduced to expressive, or creative, photography. His teachers suggested that photography could be more than rigorous technique and pure documentation.

Minor White, a noted photographer and Uelsmann's teacher at RIT, required his students to "photograph things not only for what they are but also for what else they are." Photography was viewed as a moment of revelation and the camera as a machine to transform the visible world rather than just record it.

While doing graduate work at Indiana University, Uelsmann was further propelled on this path by another teacher, Henry Holmes Smith. Smith was an experimenter with cameraless imagery who urged Uelsmann to explore his reasons for making photograph - his inner vision. Realizing that he was capturing "some significant fragments"[1] in his photographs, Uelsmann compiled an image bank of contact sheets and began experimenting with them on a table. Then, after selecting a few images, he began experimenting with the negatives in his darkroom. Eventually, as the evolution of what he called "in-process discovery"[2] developed, Uelsmann perfected his printmaking skills and was able to blend separate images seamlessly into powerful, personal statements.

After exploring this process further during his first years as a teacher at the University of Florida, Uelsmann wrote an essay explaining his position and process. Titled "Post-visualization" (1966), this manifesto encouraged experimentation with every step of the photographic process for the purposes of self-expression. Although Uelsmann met with severe criticism from colleagues who preferred the traditional role of photography, he persevered. During the past three decades, Uelsmann has created a body of work that has won recognition from major museums throughout the world and helped establish photomontage as a legitimate art form.

The Search for Discovery

For Uelsmann, the darkroom is an alchemical chamber where all sorts of magical, mysterious, humorous events can occur. He wrote, "Once in the darkroom, the venturesome mind and spirit should be set free - free to search and hopefully discover."[13] In his photographs, intuition, imagination, and nonlinear thinking are given free rein. Although clear and detailed, his composite images have an ambiguous and dreamlike effect; they elude precise interpretation. Uelsmann once remarked, "I think of my photographs as being obviously symbolic but not symbolically obvious,"[14] indicating there are many "right" answers to the questions he poses in his photographs. Today, Uelsmann describes himself as a product of the '60s, drawing on meditation and, like his photographer friend, Ansel Adams, visiting energy spots on the earth, such as Yosemite National Park to create enigmatic images that have a spiritual quality.

Many of Uelsmann's students at the University of Florida, where he continues to teach, have transferred what they learned from him to the computer screen. Uelsmann himself has experimented with Adobe [Photoshop.sup.TM] and obtained spectacular results. Yet, in this dawning era of digitized imagery, Uelsmann remains committed to the laborious process of creating hand-crafted, silver print photomontages, a process that allows him to navigate the depths of his inner world while exploring the outer world of appearances, skillfully joining the two in ways that surprise, delight, and mystify us. (Silver prints are made by exposing paper with a layer containing both gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts to light under a film negative, usually in an enlarger, and then chemically developed to produce an image.)

Resources

[1] Karabinis, Paul. History/Mystery: Photography by Jerry N. Uelsmann, 1957-1993. Gainesville, FL: Samuel P. Ham Museum of Art, University of Florida, 1994. [2] Coleman, A. D. Jerry Uelsmann/Photosynthesis. University Press of Florida, 1992. [3] Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jerry N. Uelsmann. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with Aperture, 1970. [4] Orland, Ted. The Landscape of the Mind in Uelsmann Yosemite. University Press of Florida, 1996. Sandler, Martin W. The Story of American Photography: An Illustrated History for Young People. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1979.

Bay Hallowell is the Special Projects Coordinator for the Division of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Suggested Activities

Elementary

Have students work in pairs, first measuring a hot dog, then measuring their height. (Be sure to agree on which dimension of the hot dog to use - height, width, or depth - before starting.) How many hot dogs tall are they? How many hot dogs tall is the classroom? the school? Make a chart showing the relative sizes. Ask the students to imagine constructing a giant hot dog, or another favorite food, to float over their homes. How big would the food need to be? What materials could be used? How would the food stay up there? Have the student draw pictures and write letters to friends or pen pals describing their ideas.

Middle

Using Hot Dog ..., guide the students' exploration of the photograph. Discuss the roles and functions of museums and hot dogs in our lives. Encourage the students to speculate on the possible meanings of combining them in one image. What if the museum building were a barn or a skyscraper? What if the hot dog were a pie or a flower or a key? How would that change the meaning? Discuss the dramatic impact of unrealistic scale. What if the museum and the hot dog were their real life sizes? Have the students create a collage that combines photographs of a building and an object, and alter their relative sizes. After the collages are completed, distribute them randomly to the students. Have the students write several short paragraphs about the collage they receive, describing the choice of images and scale, and discussing possible interpretations.

High School

After discussing Hot Dog ..., ask the students to make comparisons between this photograph and an example of Pop art (Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol) or Surrealist art (Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali). First, they can describe qualities in the two works of art that are similar, for example: dreamlike, unrealistic scale. Then, they can list contrasting aspects, for example: silver print photograph (to describe Hot Dog ...) and photo silk-screen (to describe Campbell's Soup Can by Warhol), or architecture (to describe Hot Dog ...) and clothespin (to describe Clothespin by Oldenburg). Use the results of this assignment as the basis for further dialog with students and for having them start independent research projects on artists of their choice.