Edmund Teske; Created Ethereal Photos

Edmund Teske, prolific artistic photographer known for his often romantic and mysterious images and for exhibits at such venues as the J. Paul Getty Museum, has died. He was 85.

Teske died Friday in his Los Angeles studio of an apparent heart attack, his dealer, Craig Krull, said Monday.

“He worked up to the day he died. He was working on his books,” said Lawrence Bump, a former student and his assistant for many years.

Although Teske’s architectural studies and ethereal montages have been purchased by major museums in Los Angeles and New York, he remained largely unknown outside the world of photography. Experts and friends have attributed that to Teske’s outspoken independence.

Teske had his own version of why he lacked the commercial popularity of someone such as Ansel Adams, telling The Times in 1993:

“I have a reputation in the galleries of being the most difficult person to deal with, 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.”

An idiosyncratic poet-philosopher, Teske in his later years was often compared in appearance to Buffalo Bill, with his shoulder-length white hair and usual costume of silk dressing gown and cowboy boots.

His work spans several styles and subjects, involving nature, portraits and the architecture of such Frank Lloyd Wright designs as Los Angeles’ Hollyhock House. Much of Teske’s work involved one-of-a-kind composites or collages that he called “duotone solarizations” that were altered by a combination of chemicals and light to look romantic.

“Anything is art depending on what attitude you bring to it,” he told The Times. “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.”

Although he abandoned them more than a decade ago, Teske was known by his followers for his semiannual “photo grabs” in which he invited students, models and their families and friends into his studio. Beer and wine flowed freely and for $35 or less anyone present could buy a Teske photograph. The artist maintained mystery by hiding the prints in tissue.

Teske, who grew up in Chicago, first picked up a box camera and looked down into it at a family picnic when he was 7.

“And lo and behold,” he liked to recall, “the entire objective world was boiled down to where a child could get a deeper sense of it. There was Aunt Tina, the duchess of the family, and I had her where I wanted her--right in the ground glass of my big box camera. That started that.”

In grammar school, a teacher introduced him to the chemical aspects of photography, teaching him to develop and print his own film.

“It is still remarkable to me,” he said of the process when he was an octogenarian. “Amazing. Like magic.”

Teske taught a photography workshop at Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Spring Green, Wis., in the mid-1930s, and later taught at UCLA.

He came to Los Angeles with the idea of acting, but later decided that would be a minor aspect of his life. He appeared as an artist in “Lust for Life” in 1956.

Teske is survived by a sister, Gertrude, who lives in suburban Chicago.