Jerry Yulsman
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- For the Florida photographer with a phonetically similar name, see Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Yulsman (born Philadelphia February 8, 1924 - August 6, 1999) was an American novelist and a photographer best known for his photographs of Jack Kerouac.
Yulsman's first camera was a $13.50 Argus, given to him by his aunt as a twelfth birthday present. He used it to photograph Roosevelt in a torchlit parade. "I was a good photographer," he recalled. "I understood both the language and the magic. It seemed to come naturally, like a gift from Providence."
Expelled from Simon Grantz High School, Yulsman lied about his age in March 1941 in order to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. In the Army photography school at Denver's Lowery Field, he learned to operate a "gun camera". Serving in North Africa, he was promoted to Master Sergeant, and on August 1, 1943, he flew in a bombing raid on the Romanian oilfield of Ploesti, an action which brought him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
After World War II, Yulsman moved to Manhattan where he became a successful freelance photojournalist, shooting "jazz, politics and girls" and hanging out in Greenwich Village at the Limelight Cafe, while contributing to Playboy and other magazines. He did photographs for two Dick Gregory books, From the Back of the Bus (Avon, 1962) and What's Happening? (1965), which offered instruction on "how to recognize Uncle Tom."
During the 1970s, Yulsman worked for the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus for four years and taught photography at the School of Visual Arts. He wrote several instructional books on photography, including Jerry Yulsman Tells How to Take Glamor Photographs (1960), The Complete Book of 8mm Movie Making (1972), The Complete Book of 35mm Photography (1976) and Color Photography Simplified (1977).
"I believe that the main function of photography is a historical one," said Yulsman. "I think of photos first as historical documents, delineating time and place, and only secondarily as possible works of art." His color photos of Kerouac with Joyce Johnson were taken in Greenwich Village outside the Kettle of Fish Bar on MacDougal Street during the fall of 1957. In this series of photographs, first published in Pageant, Johnson is always seen standing in the background. This is because she thought Yulsman only wanted Kerouac in the frame, so she stepped aside. However, Yulsman cleverly repositioned the angle to include her, adding to the fascination of the images. However, when one of the photos from this session was used for a Gap ad, airbrushing was used to remove Johnson from the picture.
Yulsman began writing fiction in the early 1980s and published two novels. Elleander Morning (Random House, 1984) is an alternative history in which World War II never happened. In the book's opening pages, Adolf Hitler is sitting in a café in Vienna in 1913 when he is assassinated with a 25-calibre Baretta by an American woman, Elleander Morning. The novel won several awards, including the 1986 Ditmar Award for best international fiction and the Science Fiction Club Deutschland's Kurt Labwitz prize.
The Last Liberator (Dutton, 1991) is based on Yulsman's WWII experiences. He planned a novel based on the Collyer brothers but abandoned it when he learned that Marcia Davenport had already fictionalized the brothers in My Brother's Keeper (1954). Under pseudonyms, he wrote adult fiction, including The Intimate Memoir of Dame Jenny Everleigh, Coming Through the Rye (1989), The Honourable Member (1990) and Cock-a-Hoop (1992).
In 1999, Yulsman died of lung cancer. At the time of his death, he was working on Gotham, a novel celebrating New York. Yulsman's fourth wife, Barbara Woike, is an Associated Press editor in New York City.
