ART REVIEW : The Shadow Over Teske’s Photographs

“Being and Becoming: Photography by Edmund Teske,” currently on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, showcases a recently acquired suite of 10 of Teske’s duotone solarization prints. These photographs, most dating from the 1960s, are accompanied by a small selection of images culled from Teske’s extensive and varied body of work.

Among the photographs Teske has produced in the last 60 years are Walker Evans-style images documenting subway passengers and Depression-era storefronts; nature photographs of astonishing clarity, produced under the influence of Paul Strand, whom the photographer met in 1940; architectural studies of Olive Hill, site of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and Studio Residence B, where Teske lived from 1944 to 1949; and later, surrealist-inspired works, which juxtapose archival photographs with incongruous landscape motifs.

Ironically, these “supplementary” images--which form a virtual compendium of 20th-Century photographic idioms--are of greater interest than the duotone solarization prints that provide the premise of the current show. This technique, developed by Teske in 1958 and named two years later by Edward Steichen, combines the processes of chemical toning and solarization to produce spontaneous effects--patches of deep umber and rivulets of cool blue, the feel of painterly surfaces and the illusion of deep space.

The dense, heavily manipulated images resulting from these processes, however, are compelling more as historical curiosities than as works of art. The technique in most cases far overshadows the imagery--whether representational or nearly abstract.

While focusing on Teske’s technical experiments and philosophical/spiritual proclivities, the labels and the accompanying brochure adroitly sidestep one of the more intriguing aspects of the work: its matter-of-fact homoeroticism.

Teske’s celebration of masculine beauty is not calibrated to announce anything, shock anyone or foreground a political agenda. What is found here is an easy, indeed casual acceptance of the male body as one among many sites of pleasure, provocation and aesthetic appeal.

Thus, a very lush, romantic portrait--one of the duotone solarization prints--of actor John Saxon, his face turned sharply to the side to highlight a classical profile; or a composite photograph of a male nude and a field of flowers, which recalls Harry Callahan’s poetic portraits of his wife, Eleanor, while reversing the gender stereotypes that inform the latter’s 1950s images.

Much of Teske’s work is indeed about memory. After 1960, he consistently returned to negatives that were produced earlier--his own, and those of others--subjecting them to chemical processes, printing them in combination with more recent images, and so on. The images that emerge comment upon the mechanics of recollection as much as the people, places and objects they configure.

Memory, however, is a tricky subject; it can easily lead to sentimental reverie. One gelatin silver composite, which combines an archival photograph dating from early in the century with a negative produced by Teske in 1976, typifies the dangers of this kind of excess.

Here, a faded photograph of three children floats in a tumultuous night sky--a vision of purity transcending the earthly landscape around Mono Lake. Teske has printed the composite so that the children’s faces are nearly transparent; they seem to turn, before our eyes, into cloud formations. Technically, this is interesting; metaphorically, it is hackneyed.

Teske is at his best when he eschews sentiment for reportage, as in the early documentary images, or when he goes in for a bit of deviltry, as in his 1970 composite photograph of filmmaker Kenneth Anger. Teske begins with two earlier images--a rakishly attired Anger from 1954 looking off into the distance and a Gustave Dore engraving from “Paradise Lost.” He ends up with a portrait of a man who dabbled in magic and satanism (directing underground films such as “Lucifer Rising” and “Invocation of My Demon Brother”) surrounded by a sweet-faced chorus of trumpeting angels--and what’s more, appearing to savor the irony.

If there are more such images in Teske’s body of work, they are nowhere in evidence at the Getty. If there are not, the museum might well have reconsidered a solo show, waiting, perhaps, to include Teske’s work in a group show focusing on experimentation in 20th-Century American photography.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 459-7611. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Through Aug. 15.