At the Peabody Essex: Photographer Jerry Uelsmann

For photographer Jerry Uelsmann, his darkroom was a shaman’s cave where he transformed familiar pictures into communal apparitions.

Decades before Photoshop, he mastered the art of composite photography, using multiple enlargers to create visionary images that defied the boundaries of the commonplace world.

In “The Mind’s Eye,’’ at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, about 90 of Uelsmann’s sly, jolting and wondrous photographs provide a rewarding retrospective of a pioneering artist who used his camera like a wand.

At a time America’s premier photographers were documenting people and places, Uelsmann said, “I like the idea I can invent a reality more meaningful than the one given to the eye.’’

Rather than record the external world everyone saw, Uelsmann — as the show’s title suggests — nudged viewers into examining “The Mind’s Eye’’ they shared with others.

An acorn’s innards seem to pulse in a woman’s chest like a beating heart. Silhouettes of five children watch as the branches of a tree glow like an irradiated mushroom cloud.

Wires and electrical circuits wind through a nerdy-looking man’s chest. A circular lake ripples in the joined palms of hands raised in devotion to a panorama of mountains.

Organized by Phillip Prodger the show comprises works from Uelsmann’s personal archives of vintage material, scores of prints, three-dimensional photographic sculptures, films and work prints that show how his composite photos were made.

The PEM’s curator of photography, he said Uelsmann “has challenged conventional ideas about what photography can and should do’’ for more than half a century.

“Uelsmann’s pictures provide a valuable touchstone for understanding new trends in photographic art,’’ said Prodger. “His ideas and example have become ever more relevant as photography embraces Photoshop and other computer technologies or altering and manipulating photographs.’’

Subtitled “50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann,’’ the show runs through July 15.

Through five galleries, visitors can follow Uelsmann’s evolution from a straightforward photographer with a willingness to experiment to a genuine pioneer whose investigations still shape the medium.

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1934, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Rochester Institute of Technology and two master’s degrees from University of Indiana where he studied under Minor White.

A year before joining the art department at the University of Florida in 1960, Uelsmann was taking photos that reveal a tentative interest in manipulating reality.

In his 1959 “Monument to War,’’ he placed a red flower in the hand of a statue of a Civil War soldier, tweaking viewers’ perceptions and presaging bolder experiments to come.

About that time Uelsmann began more dramatic juxtapositions, placing an owl’s head atop dirty human feet or, in an homage to Rene Magritte, superimposing a floating boulder over a woman sleeping in a field.

Yet at the same time he was shooting straightforward photos that revealed a sharp-eye for telling details and a social conscience at the onset of the civil rights era.

Taken in 1958 or 1959, a photo of two running children, including one with untied shoelaces, simultaneously evokes the innocent joys and vulnerability of childhood.

Ulesmann’s photos in the early 1960s of a young black man, a custodian and a blind guitarist are equally rich in detail and character

On the surface, his signature photos over the next decades duplicated the sharp, nuanced clarity of Ansel Adams’ Modernist landscapes.

Yet in his darkroom, Uelsmann became the anti-Adams, subverting reality’s laws by using his several enlargers as a sort of visual Mixmaster.

As far back as the 1850s, photographers had juxtaposed images on top of one another or side-by-side by manipulating negatives. Uelsmann created a body of work that became the mid-20th century American correlative to European surrealists like Magritte, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel with nods to Carl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges.

While some skeptics might want to dismiss Uelsmann as Timothy Leary with a camera and darkroom, they should remember his work parallels the discoveries of parallel dimensions by the 20th century’s greatest physicists.

Describing his approach, Uelsmann said, “The camera is a fluid way of encountering that other reality.’’

It’s an oversimplification to compare Uelsmann’s labor-intensive darkroom work to playing with Photoshop.

Rather than just using a computer to alter and change images, he was imagining states-of-mind and alternate realities and than making photos of them.

At the simplest level, Uelsmann’s photos range from simple fun to provocative and even profound. Challenging our basic presumptions about reality, he is never pretentious and comes across like a Zen monk with a camera, never afraid to act crazy to get at a deeper truth.

Three women stand in a haunted wood, gazing into a lake that only mirrors back two reflections. An empty dinghy floats atop the crest of a wave as if sailing into a glowing moon. A sad-eyed woman stares out of a dark room, inhabited only by silhouettes of faceless people.

Explaining his long career, Uelsmann said, “I have gradually confused photography with life.’’

If you want to get confused too, check out the “Mind’s Eye’’ of a dark room wizard.

“The Mind’s Eye: 50 Years of Photography by Jerry Uelsmann"

WHERE: Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, Salem

INFO: 866-745-1876, www.pem.org