Photoshop has achieved that photo manipulation is the order of the day and we can find extraordinary works of diverse types of artists who are capable of taking any idea that they have in their imagination to a creative piece.
But before the Photoshop era, there were photographers and artists who were capable ofe create simply spectacular images when handling negatives directly from the dark room. Artists of the stature of Jerry Uelsman were simply magnificent between the 60s and 70s.
All that photo manipulation is done from the dark room where the light is blocked to make certain parts of the photo appear, then change the negatives right there.
The way the silver gelatin in the photo paper works is that the more light I getthe darker the tone it takes. By ensuring that there are parts of the paper that will receive light at any given time, an image can be created as if they were layers in Photoshop.
This is how the system worked and they were able to carry out those majestic photomanipulations that look like they were taken from Adobe's photo editing program. The funny thing is that Photoshop itself and its tools have those names because it is supposedly a digital photo store. The Avid Media Composer itself and its tools also mimic / emulate the movie editing process.
The photographs you see here are taken by Jerry Uelsmann, a american photographer known for his photomontages that are compositions of multiple negatives. Work in the laboratory has in some cases made him use up to twelve enlargers to work on them one after another. This allowed him to imbue his photographs with a surreal character, as you can see in these example photographs.
His images are also famous for appear in the episodes of the television series Beyond the 1995 Limit. He has also worked with Stephen King on an edition of The Salem's Lot Mystery.
stop by Erik Johansson's photomanipulation.