PHOTOGRAPHY : On the Outside Looking In : An Edmund Teske retrospective at the Getty comes late in the life of an artist who has long been long been respected by art-world insiders for his visionary photographs. Now 82, Teske has mentored many noted artists

On two Sunday afternoons each year, photographer Edmund Teske would open his studio to his students and models, their families and friends. Beer and wine flowed freely, the place was packed, and for $35 or less, you could walk away with one of Teske’s photographs.

Sometimes the images would be traditional, sometimes far more mysterious. You never knew what you were getting, since Teske would hide each print in tissue. And it could be a long, long wait before the artist would finish reciting his poetry and telling stories and get around to the photographs.

Teske, now 82, stopped holding his “photo grabs” about 10 years ago, but he remains far outside the mainstream art world. His Hollywood storefront studio looks frozen in time, and so does its owner. With his shoulder-length white hair, silk dressing gown and cowboy boots, the legendary photographer inhabits a space as otherworldly as many of his images.

Teske’s work spans several styles and subjects, involving both nature and portraits. Some are traditional black-and-white studies, such as his documentation of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. But others are collages, composites or one-of-a-kind “duotone solarizations” altered by a combination of chemicals and light to look painterly or romantic.

Teske has always danced to his own music. He experimented with the photographic process at a time when people were barely acknowledging it as an art form, and he took photographs of male nudes as early as the ‘30s. His bohemian lifestyle swept in a stay at Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, minor roles onstage and friendships with avant-garde filmmakers and others.

The photographer’s work has been exhibited at and bought by major museums in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere over the years. Yet Teske remains largely unknown outside photography circles, in part because of his fierce independence and disdain for the marketplace. A Teske retrospective at the J. Paul Getty Museum, opening Tuesday for two months, comes at a time when he is still as obscure in his hometown as he is elsewhere.

Yet such prominent photographers as Robert Heinecken and Leland Rice readily acknowledge their debt to and affection for Teske, a man both have known for decades.

“He was one of the few people I ran into in photography who allowed me to see photography as something larger and more expansive than what I thought it was,” Heinecken says. “I was struck by the idea that the photograph could be manipulated and superimposed with other images. It could be poetic and not limited to reality.”

Teske has long seen himself as a poet with a camera, an artist in the tradition of Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott--people he worked with or learned from. His conversation is peppered with references to or quotations from such inspirational sources as Wright and Walt Whitman.

“As a young man, Teske clearly admitted identifying himself with Byron, Shelley and Keats,” says Getty photography curator Weston Naef. “He came to Los Angeles thinking he might be an actor. But instead of becoming a hero on screen, he quietly lived out his life following the heroic model.

“After I came out here (in 1984), I felt strongly that he was the most important photographer of the senior generation and perhaps of any generation working out here--west of Chicago--because of his originality, persistence and stylistic continuity. I felt he was important then, and today I feel he is even more important.”

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The drapes are off, and you can see straight into Teske’s Hollywood studio from the street. His mounted photographs are stacked against the wall like so many record albums, and the room is dotted with worn-out, unmatched chairs whose bedspreads-cum-cushions hide protruding springs. Old magazines lie here and there, and so do old Christmas trees.

Rice, 52, who first contacted Teske in the ‘60s after seeing his photographs at a local exhibition, still recalls his initial visit to the older artist’s studio: “I felt like I walked into a place to have my fortune told, like I was attending a seance. It was a very strange, very wonderful, very mysterious experience.”

It still is. Teske’s front room and photography lab both have the calm and flavor of period stage sets. A spider falls from a web as a guest reaches up to turn on a light, and one senses that little has changed since Teske moved into sculptor Tony Smith’s former studio in 1968.

One colleague pegs Teske as a Buffalo Bill look-alike, while another says that he seems to have stepped out of a Byron poem. Visitors are fewer these days, and obviously pleased at the attention, Teske spins tale after tale, a beatific smile on his face as he dips into memory.

Teske talks the way he looks: “Anything is art depending on what attitude you bring to it. You or I sweep the floor out of necessity, and it’s a mundane occupation. But Isadora Duncan would come in and sweep the floor, and she would touch into the underlying rhythms of that process. Art is a matter of picking up on the mundane and giving it form at a higher level of expression.”

Time is clearly on a continuum for Teske, whose key images of family members, friends, Mono Lake and other settings reappear again and again in different combinations. A collage of Wright, set up on the easel in his studio, is something he worked on from 1939 to 1971, and one senses it is still in process.

His photographs start with portraits of people or nature, often combined many years later in composite photographs. He doesn’t ever tamper with the initial negative, explains Getty curatorial assistant Julian Cox, but rather makes a second-generation negative to work with.

The artist first happened upon the solarization process by accident. Looking at Man Ray’s photos in an issue of Vanity Fair in the early ‘30s, he found a “very strange, wonderful, remarkable thing happening” but couldn’t find any further information on the process. Then, in his own darkroom one day, he turned the light on before one of his negatives had fully developed, then left it there to see what would happen.

“Enter chance and fate, vital elements in everything,” he says, smiling. “It was a perfect solarization.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s Edward Steichen first labeled Teske’s variant on solarization “duotones,” and Teske says he really can’t explain the process in words. “The process is reductive, like erasing a pencil line,” says Getty curator Naef. “How do you explain that? The works speak directly to the eyes, like manifestations of dreams, and dreams are things we never quite remember completely.”

Memory is a living thing to Teske. He was born--or, as he puts it, “brought to life”--in 1911, the same year Wright launched his Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin. Teske wrote in one exhibition catalogue of traveling as a child with his mother on the No. 4 streetcar in Chicago, always making sure to take a seat that offered him a view of Wright’s Midway Gardens.

At a family picnic when he was 7, Edmund picked up his mother’s box camera and looked down into it: “And lo and behold, the entire objective world was boiled down to where a child could get a deeper sense of it. There was Aunt Tina, the dutchess of the family, and I had her where I wanted her--right in the ground glass of my big box camera. That started that: From then on, I was a snap shooter.”

He was encouraged by his grammar school teacher Mabel Morehouse, who “initiated us into the chemical mysteries of photography. I was not only putting film in the camera and making exposures but taking the film out, developing it and seeing the image come up. It is still remarkable to me. Amazing. Like magic.”

He set aside other interests in poetry, saxophone and piano to pursue photography professionally. Visits to photography studios and shows were capped by a pivotal exhibition of Edward Weston’s photographs at the Chicago Art Institute in the ‘30s: “I was utterly taken with the exquisite wonder and beauty of them,” Teske says. “I began to know that photography was an art.”

Encouraged by photographer George Miller, for whom he was shooting photos for Sears catalogues and other commercial clients, Teske started stressing the artistic side of his craft.

It is Frank Lloyd Wright, however, whom Teske calls both hero and idol. Violist Joe Elson, an acquaintance of Teske’s, had a hunch that Wright would appreciate Teske’s photography. Elson made arrangements for Teske to visit Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, Wis., in the mid-’30s.

Teske stayed on to establish Taliesin’s first photography workshop and, as he has put it, “became part and parcel of the Frank Lloyd Wright happening.” And when Teske returned to Chicago nearly two years later, he added the documentation of Wright’s architecture to his growing photographic interests.

In 1943, Teske left Chicago, heading first to Wright’s Taliesin West outside Phoenix, then on to Los Angeles. Enamored of the movies, toying with the thought of becoming an actor, he worked at Paramount for a while in the stills department--”long enough to know that wasn’t what to do.”

He was caught up more in the romance than the mechanics of film. “I read in movie magazines where Greta Garbo walked at the ocean’s edge in the rain alone,” he says. “And I really only wanted one thing--to walk near her, invisibly.”

Teske moved swiftly into Los Angeles’ artistic circles when he met Aline Barnsdall at her Olive Hill residence, a Wright building immortalized in many of his photographs and located perhaps a mile from his current residence. Within a year of his arrival here, he was living in “Studio Residence B,” a guest house in what is now Barnsdall Art Park, a place Barnsdall had envisioned as an arts center.

The artist lived there until the building was torn down in 1949, holding weekend film showings and becoming friendly with filmmakers and other artists. He photographed theater in Chicago, often playing minor roles, then did the same in the ‘50s in Topanga Canyon, where he became friendly with Will Geer and other actors. He played a scene as an artist in the movie “Lust for Life” in 1956, and in the ‘60s, a friendship with Jim Morrison resulted in his doing the cover of the Doors’ 1968 album “Waiting for the Sun.”

Teske turned largely to artists in other fields in L.A. because of the relatively recent acceptance of photography as a major art form, photographer Heinecken explains: “He began as a loner in the kind of work he was doing. His circle was poets, actors and sculptors who had ideas similar to his, rather than photographers.”

His influence on other photographers increased in the ‘60s, when Heinecken invited him to teach at UCLA: “He stood out in my mind as an individual who had very valuable things to talk to young people about in terms of life experience as well as photography. He is completely unique, which is why I thought he would be effective. And he was.”

Teske developed a following of former students, says Heinecken, who supported the artist by buying his pictures. As he has gotten older, they check in to make sure he is fine physically and financially.

While Heinecken prefers the term “spiritual mentor,” Teske’s dealer Craig Krull at Los Angeles’ Turner/Krull Gallery says he “absolutely” is a cult figure as well. “I send young artists to meet him as a sage to get wisdom,” Krull says. “People I feel would really connect with what he’s done and who might be inspired.”

Teske is also a great performer who loves an audience, adds lawyer and photography collector Andrew Schwartz, who frequented Teske’s photo grabs. “I think he always saw himself as larger than life and realizes he has a special presence. He is finally getting the recognition he should have gotten before--Los Angeles doesn’t do much for its heroes.”

Getty curator Naef has long been what one colleague calls a champion of Teske’s work. Naef exhibited Teske’s work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was a curator of photography there, and he also acquired Teske prints for that institution. The artist is just the second living photographer (after Manuel Alvarez-Bravo) to be honored with a solo show at the Getty.

“Although his artistic roots go to Moholy-Nagy, Stieglitz and Strand, people whose work he looked at carefully, establishing himself in the midstream of mid-century modernism, he is the quintessential loner,” Naef says. “He followed his own compass, almost to an extreme degree, and succeeded in creating a style that was so identifiable, so recognizable--a visual signature.”

When the Getty’s photography collection was first assembled about 10 years ago, it included about a dozen Teske photographs. But many of the 34 photographs in the exhibition opening this week are either new purchases or loans from the photographer. (The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, a sister institution, includes among its holdings letters from Teske to Wright as well as a sequence of 235 of Teske’s documentary photos of Wright’s buildings from the ‘30s and ‘40s.)

The Getty show has been put together in close consultation with Teske, says Getty curatorial assistant Cox. “Edmund is a very determined, self-assured individual who likes his work to be presented in very specific ways.”

Asked why Teske is not more prominent today, dealers, museum curators and photographers alike cite that independence. Typical is the response of curator Naef: “He is such an idiosyncratic person, literally a poet-philosopher. There’s an antisocial streak about him.”

Teske was also long out of sync with popular taste, which tended toward more realistic photographers, says Leland Rice, citing the greater attention paid to such photographers as Weston, Strand, Stieglitz or Ansel Adams. His work also has strong romantic and spiritual overtones, Rice says: “To uncork spirituality in an artist’s work and make it digestible, readable, believable and even embraced by the general public is really difficult.”

Teske’s traditional black-and-white photos sell today for about $1,800, says Krull, who negotiated the recent sales of Teske’s work to the Getty, and his one-of-a-kind solarized duotones run $3,000 to $5,000. But Teske’s prices only recently climbed that high, Krull explains, because Teske “has always been an independent spirit who mistrusted and perhaps miscalculated the value of the gallery system.”

Just ask Teske himself. “I have a reputation in the galleries of being the most difficult person to deal with,” he readily concedes, “because I don’t want to deal with a bunch of wheelers and dealers. I’m an artist. I’m idealistically oriented. My results are aesthetic. Whatever money they may bring, well and good, because you’ve got to have money. There’s got to be an exchange of values. But when it becomes unbalanced and totally a commodity on the market for money, that, to me, is disgusting. And I underline the word disgusting with red pencil.”

Teske says he has no idea how many photographs he has taken over the years but estimates that the number is probably in the thousands: “I don’t enumerate anything, and I don’t have secretaries. I don’t jot down who has my prints or what collection I am in.”

He seems fragile these days, slowed by both arthritis and a bad back. Somebody shot at him through the glass front door of his studio a few years ago, wounding him in the face.

His needs today are cared for mostly by two former students, one his longtime assistant, photographer Lawrence Bump, and another his longtime model, photographer Nils Vidstrand. “Nils is a dominant element in my work,” Teske says. “He’s like Apollo beautiful. Part of my mission is to bring forward the beauty and the wonder of all things, particularly the male, because in our time and place, and for the past hundred or more years, the beauty of the male has been put down.

“Being of the male species myself, I’m very narcissistic, and as I see the great beauty of other male beings, I long to be like them. We always long for something more than what we are. We are all, at the surface, fragments. But the fullness of being is within.”

Teske stresses the connectedness of life in both his art and being, and part of that stems from his beliefs in Hinduism’s Vedanta philosophy. He attended Vedanta temples here as far back as the ‘40s, and references to yoga and meditation punctuate his conversation today.

Whereas the Getty show focuses on other aspects of Teske’s work, an exhibition scheduled for the Turner/Krull Gallery in late fall will center on what Krull calls Teske’s “use of the male nude not as a glamorous figure but in the context of Eastern mysticism. Although male homoerotic photography has recently become quite fashionable, most of it is a rather hollow glamorization. Edmund’s male nudes . . . have a deeper poetic and philosophic resonance.”

The photographer is also working on three books that include his poetry as well as images. He has no publisher, he says, adding: “I feel when the time is ready, the publisher will show himself.”