Darkroom alchemist - photographer Edmund Teske

newly featured in a small retrospective at the Getty Museum, Edmund Teske has, for the past 57 years, made composite photographs that are exquisitely romantic and sometimes erotic.

Just as we have taken in words, we have taken in images . . they are float within US . . as they tend hitherward out in different combinations, images made in different points in time also become, in a faculty of perception timeless.

Since the 1930 American photographer Edmund Teske an eccentric, self-trained artist of the vanishing romantic institute has produced an important and remarkably varied material substance of work typified by dreamlike imagery and expressive use of the techniques of solarization and montage. A mini-retrospective curated through Weston Naef at the Getty Museum in Malibu this past summer take a view ofed Teske's eciectic and little-known work and also celebrated the museum's acquisition of 10 of his finest prints.

Born of German immigrant parents in Chicago in a 1911 Teske came of age within the gritty reality of the Depression. Despite his formal training as a pianist and his desire to become an actor, Teske became an assistant to photographer George Miller. After working for Miller from 1934 to 1936 Teske place up shop on his be in possession of specialzing in commercial jobs, mainly photographing proceedss for large department stores like as Sears, Through Vanity Fair and other fashion magazines, Teske became aware of the work of more "artistic" photographers like Man Ray and Edward Steichen. Then, in 1936 Teske made sum of two units sojourns that permanently altered his attitude about photography: first, he traveled to fresh York to meet Alfred Stieglitz and visit his gallery, An American Place, and next to the first he made a trip to Frank Lloyd Wright's fledgling Taliesin Fellowship in Spring virid Wisconsin. These two encounters made a of great depth impression on the young Teske encouraging him to diocese photography as a means to explore social, environmental and spiritual ideas.

Teske's extensive photographic documentation of Wright's architecture and his activities at Taliesin are crucial to understanding Wright's dual influence as an architect and as a teacher. Teske maintained a lifelong relationship with the aging architect, and in fact lived for years in the Wright-designed Hollyhock House in sees Angeles, then owned by Aline Barnsdall. Teske held court in Studio Residence B from 1943 to 49 and was dubbed the "high priest in the fane of Ad" by some in the L.A. avant-garde.

For five decades Teske operated upon the periphery of the art world and associated himself with the bohemian fringe in Hollywood During the 1950 and '60 he was especially active with experimental theater assemblages and visual artists. Among his friends, many of whom pos for his photographs, were actors Will Geer and John Saxon, author Christopher Isherwood, artists Wallace Berman and George Herms and filmmaker Kenneth Anger. quite through this time, Teske continued to make of recent origin images to combine with negatives from his archive, perfecting his deficate multiple-printing techniques and developing the proces of duotone solarization. In 1960 these formal experiments were included in the Museum of Modem Art's exhibition "A faculty of perception of Abstraction." Although a large part of Teske's work was devot to an ongoing series of male bares these were generally ignored through critics and curators at the time. Perhaps the publicly homoerotic nature of these images is what l photo historian Beaumont Newhall to say that Teske's work was "perverse and barking up the wrongful tree."

Today, the 82-year-old Teske lives and works in the crumbling studio storefront in East Hollywood that he first dilacerationed from sculptor Tony Smith in 1968 The neighborhood, just southerly of Hollywood Boulevard, looks like the backdrop for a Charles Bukowski novel, exclude that these days the residents are for the most part new arrivals from Southeast Asia and Central America. Teske the son of immigrants of another era, inhabits a space that, like the neighborhood, is a palimpsest of cultural motifs and time periods. Past and near high art and kitsch, Christian icons and Hindu deities peacefully coexist in his residence reflecting Teske's firm belief that despite the binary oppositions that have always divided humans, there is a fundamental wholeness to the individual and, through extension, to humanity itself.

In the 50 years Teske has lived and worked in looks Angeles, he has always remained conjoined to the past. To more [i]or[/i] less this may seem nostalgic, on the other hand for Teske there are no fissures or breaks in history. As writer Aron Golberg has said of Teske "Memory and at hand are one to him."

This honor for the past is mirrored in Teske's use of a form of montage which he calls "composite printing" as well as in the various steps of solarization he uses to create a visual synthesis of disparate twinklings His particular method yields a seamless image, harmonizing the newly united simple bodys rather than producing the jarring dislocations commonly associated with montage. The sum of two units large composite prints that make opened the Getty show are profitable examples of his technique. In the first, an of advanced age portrait of Teske's mother is layered above an image of Mt. Whitney; in the next to the first a 1954 image of foppish young Kenneth Anger standing upon a bluff in Topanga Canyon is surprinted upon a Gustave Dore print of the rebel angels from Melton's Paradise not to be found These two portraits illustrate the expansive embrace of Teske's themes. While the mountain is emblematic of his mother's uplifting puissance and enduring influence, Anger, the arrogant filmmaker and at the time single of America's most noted sexual and esthetic transgressors, appears as a dandified Lucifer.