Images of immateriality

Ambivalence was something photographer Edmund Teske embodied during his lifetime but rarely elicited in others. Deeply introspective, he was also outrageously flamboyant. A sensitive and caring friend, he was also famously self-absorbed. Those who knew him or his work didn’t straddle the fence. He had his detractors, and he had his champions -- both products, perhaps, of a lifetime spent casting off convention.

Preeminent photo historian Beaumont Newhall once responded to a portfolio of Teske’s work by calling his printing methods “perverse

But by the 1960s and ‘70s, Teske (1911-96) had been the subject of several exhibitions, and his work had been collected by major institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He had been published too, even by White in the photography journal Aperture a few years after that disparaging letter. Numerous artists considered Teske an inspiration. Gallery owner Craig Krull came to know him in the ‘80s and staged the last few commercial shows Teske had during his lifetime. Krull’s voice exudes affection when he recalls, “He had a sense of the shaman. He was an artist 24 hours a day -- he lived and breathed his work. He was a poet in the ultimate sense, not just a person who writes poetry but lives a lifestyle in a poetic way.”

Teske may have loved attention, but he also stood in his own way of getting it through his aggressive independence and resistance to practical career demands. Bolstered early on by the poetry and example of Walt Whitman, Teske lived as though Whitman’s “Song of Myself” were his personal anthem: “I exist as I am, that is enough, / If no other in the world be aware I sit content, / And if each and all be aware I sit content.”

He would no doubt be sitting quite content this week as a solo show of his work opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Spirit Into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske” opens Tuesday, accompanied by a well-executed catalog. Eleven years ago, the Getty staged a small Teske show, a sampling. This one, with about 120 prints, offers a full retrospective of the photographer and his character of extremes.

Born in Chicago, Teske became involved in photography, theater and music as a young man. He dropped out of high school just shy of graduating and pursued a patchy course in self-education, including evening classes and jobs assisting commercial photographers. His close-up portraits of family and friends are akin in intensity to the work of New Objectivity photographers of the ‘20s and ‘30s.

In 1936, Teske met Frank Lloyd Wright and fell under the great architect’s spell, photographing him and several of his buildings and serving as an honorary fellow at Taliesin North, Wright’s estate near Spring Green, Wis. Teske gleaned from this contact an acute concern for aesthetic detail in presentation that he maintained his entire life. Back in Chicago, he embarked on an extended photographic portrait of the city, its textures, motion and human and material residue.

Drawn by the dream of work in cinematography -- he had earlier shot some footage for Paul Strand -- Teske moved to Los Angeles in 1943. Although the film career didn’t pan out, California worked its wonders on Teske, triggering radical reinventions of both his personal life and photographic art.

He settled first in Hollywood, in one of the Wright-designed studio residences commissioned by Aline Barnsdall, and later in Topanga Canyon, mixing with other artists, writers, actors and filmmakers. His work became more inventive, deviating from the social documentation of his Chicago years to encompass personal memories, homoerotic attractions and spiritual beliefs. He began combining negatives and experimenting with unusual printing techniques. For the rest of his working life, he added to and drew from a reservoir of images -- portraits, Mono Lake landscapes and studies of found objects.

Widening his audience

Julian COX, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum, organized “Spirit Into Matter,” hoping the show would broaden Teske’s audience and expand understanding of the photographer among those familiar with his work. Teske is best known -- nearly exclusively so -- for his “duotone solarizations,” prints with reversed positive/negative values and chance stains and streaks in tones of slate and rust. He refined the darkroom process in the ‘50s, decades after meeting Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and admiring his solarized prints. It was these pioneering manipulations of Teske’s that Beaumont Newhall found perverse.

“There were aspects of his printing, from the ‘60s on, that didn’t sit well with the Newhalls of the world,” Cox says. “You’ll never find the word ‘sophistication’ in any of their descriptions of his work. His approach to the medium was expressive, not so much interested in the refinement of the image as in the refinement of the emotional content. He was obsessively interested in his private, internal concerns. Teske was a lone wolf following his own instincts.... But that’s a major reason he was never taken that seriously by the heavy hitters on the East Coast.”

On the West Coast, Teske did find artistic soul mates. His attraction to found materials and chance processes resonated strongly with California assemblage artists George Herms, Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman. A compelling interview with Herms, a close friend of Teske’s for more than 30 years, is included in the exhibition catalog. In it, Herms credits Teske with having profoundly influenced him by affirming the richness of the everyday and the expired as raw material for art. “The planet is the art supply store,” he is quoted as saying. “I get this from Edmund.”

If Teske’s technical practices were out of the mainstream, so too were his spiritual leanings. Shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, he was taken by Christopher Isherwood to the Vedanta temple in Hollywood. He latched onto this branch of Hinduism, became a regular at the temple and, as Cox explains, “took this philosophy into his life.”

The impact of Vedantic Hinduism is critical to understanding Teske’s work, Cox says: “To many people it’s an acquired taste. You either can absorb it and enter into it and have some sensitivity to it, or dismiss it as something that photography’s just not about. The show will enable people to draw their own conclusions about this character as an artist. He detested definitive statements about himself and especially about his sexuality. He had a multivalent way of looking at his life, his work, his relationships. ‘Fluidity’ is one of the key words he would always use -- allowing things to be always changing and reconstituting themselves, which is why he kept going back to earlier images. The way in which he makes these composite photographs from different negatives made from different points in time relates to the Vedantic understanding of cyclical time. To some people there’s redundancy in that reiteration, but to him it was important and related to the continuities one finds in life.”

Visitors to the Getty show might feel challenged to find the thread unifying Teske’s romantic portraits, sober social documentation and spiritually driven montages. But seen through the filter of Vedanta, with its teachings of ultimate interconnectedness, the life and the work no longer jar.

Herms offers yet another useful way of comprehending Teske’s path. It mirrors, he says in the catalog interview, something much larger.

“In a montage of all of Edmund’s photographs, you would see a definition of America going from Yankee ingenuity to the absolutely impossible depths of the Depression, and then evolving into a place where lust has to come to grips with social injustice, and an almost pan-erotic love of self.”

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‘Spirit Into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske’

When: Opens June 15. Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.

to 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays,

10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

Ends: Sept. 26

Price: Free; parking, $5

Contact: (310) 440-7300