techniques used by German photographer John
Heartfield to create intricate photomontages with
a political end. Tiger heads sitting atop political
figures and babies gnawing on axes are just some
of Heartfield’s masterful combinations used to
illustrate his anti-fascist message.
Interested in the play on reality offered by
photomontage, Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky
used the technique to create his well-known self-
portrait of 1924 titledThe Constructor. Together
with direct exposure and sandwiched negatives,
Lissitzky pictured his eye and hand as one insepar-
able unit suggesting a mutual reliance between his
mind and his creative output. The range of details
within this one image illustrates his complex iden-
tity. In a similar investigation of individuality, the
photograph by German artist Alice Lex Nerlinger
titledSeamstress(1930), pictures a young woman
operating a sewing machine. A closely cropped
image of the woman’s face, with lips slightly parted
in speech, is imposed over the scene. By creating
one image from two views, the photograph speaks
to the woman’s multi-faceted character.
In 1967 Edith Ge ́rin, a French photographer par-
ticularly interested in surrealism, created L’Arbre
Fantastiqueby sandwiching two negatives of ex-
tremely different origins. One pictured a conven-
tional landscape with a majestic tree at the center
of the composition. To add texture and intrigue to
the landscape, Ge ́rin combined that negative with
a negative she made of crystallized liquid on glass.
In the photograph, the crystals emerge through
the woodsy image and create a layered and omi-
nous scene.
Beginning in the early 1960s, American pho-
tographer Jerry N. Uelsmann began investigating
the surreal by combining strange and unusual
details to create scenes that are other-worldly.
Through a variety of manual manipulations,
including sandwiched negatives, Uelsmann tricks
the eye by overlaying objects upon suspended
nudes or conflating cloudy skies with hovering
cubes. In these images staged environments are
created and manipulated to reveal daunting and
humorous fictions. In a 1989 photograph that pic-
tures a flaming desk with a breathtaking mountain
range in the background, Uelsmann sandwiched
one of his in-studio fires with a bulky executive
desk. Combined with an image of Yosemite, the
photograph is a dazzling narrative of unlikely nat-
ural occurrences that yield a psychological tenor.
Uelsmann describes his process as being one of
‘‘post-visualization’’ whereby the darkroom is the
setting for the investigation of numerous negative
combinations. With multiple enlargers, multiple
negatives, and sandwiching of two or even three
negatives at a time, Uelsmann’s photographs are
intricate composites of the human figure, nature,
interiors, and exterior environments. His methods
bring together images that do not naturally exist in
tandem; they exist only in his creative photographs.
RebeccaMorse
Seealso: Heartfield, John; Manipulation; Uels-
mann, JerryFurther Reading
Ades, Dawn.Photomontage. New York: Pantheon Books,
1976.
Coleman, A.D. (introduction).Jerry Uelsmann: Photo Syn-
thesis. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992.
Langford, Michael John.The Darkroom Handbook. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984, p. 233–235.
Photographic Surrealism. Exh. cat. Cleveland: The New
Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979.SCANNING
When a photograph is viewed with a loupe, the
magnified field of vision shows a collection of
dots abutting one another, which creates the pic-
ture. Put simply, up close a photographic image is a
dot matrix and learning how to control the dots is
the issue when printing out the image digitally.
Before printing though, a photograph needs to be
converted from a hard copy into digital informa-
tion via a scan. This turns the dots into digital bits
of information. Scanned images hold potentialitySANDWICHED NEGATIVES