Sandra Ullmann: Route 22

Sandra Ullmann’s photographs, taken along Illinois Route 22, often lead viewers to ask her what she photographed, perhaps with the hope of finding themselves on more solid ground as they try to understand what they see.

In her series, Ullmann invites viewers to bypass that urge and to play with what comes to mind. She hopes her images will raise questions about the ambiguity of seeing and about the many ways in which we see and don’t see. For Ullmann the “reality” of these images both is and isn’t what we see.

Ullmann considers each image to be a portrait expressing something that is deeply human, but wrapped up or contained. Easier to take in, she believes, are the forms that appear more gentle, loving and protective. More difficult are those that suggest fears of abandonment and isolation, the inability to see or to cry out.

Ullmann’s many years as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst have made her sensitive to the endless similarities between making art and making sense of who we are. She states, “It is clear to me that in art, psychotherapy and life, seeing requires forgetting the name, the assumption, the judgment. Seeing also demands that we tolerate the unknown; it asks that we come back again and again to look more deeply."

The exhibition includes an artist’s book in a limited edition of eighteen copies, with twelve photographs printed by Ullmann. The book was hand bound and designed by Ed Marquand, Paper Hammer Press, Tieton, Washington.

Image: Sandra Ullman, Route 22