Spirit into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske

by Julian Cox
Getty Publications, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2004
180pp. illus. 80 b/w, 30 col. Trade, $70.00; paper, $40.00
ISBN: 0-89236-760-1; ISBN: 0-89236-761-X.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.Dahlberg@bakernet.com

Is Edmund Teske "the least appreciated master photographer" as the dealer Lee Witkin believed? This survey of Teske's life and work published by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles certainly suggests that this is the case. The book was published to coincide with the first major retrospective of Teske's work at the Getty in 2004.

Teske was born in Chicago in 1911 where he began his photographic career. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s and continued to develop experimental and innovative dark room techniques such as duotone solarisation and composite printing. The 79 plates in this book survey Teske's work throughout his career. The earlier work is more accessible and easier to understand, but it is clear that Teske was, during his Chicago period, a great modern photographer who photographed the commuters in Chicago street cars (before anyone else photographed commuters, claims Julian Cox in his essay in this book), mannequins in store windows, the shop window as a still life, menacing marionettes, and other ordinary aspects and found objects of contemporary urban like. Unfortunately Teske, by his own admission, was a difficult artist who did not often get along with dealers, curators, and others who could advance his career. His achievements were recognised by only small circles of people, albeit often quite eminent ones, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Strand, and Man Ray.

Teske's work changed dramatically over his lifetime. His experimental darkroom work came to dominate, and it is hard to believe that the same photographer who took the darkly compelling photographs of the clown marionette and the store windows is the same photographer who produced the composite prints of women's faces transposed onto buildings, of children's faces hovering in the air over a lake, and of nudes transposed onto rocks and natural objects. These composite prints and solarisations seem like a form of Victorian surrealism——a strange hybrid. It is as though Teske began as an early modernist and, then, developed innovative and complex dark room techniques that allowed him to move back in time to express the repressed sensibilities of an earlier period. As Cox points out, there is a powerful homoerotic element through much of Teske's work, and it is hard not to conclude that his search for technical innovation was not also a search for a way of viewing and expressing the male body in a form acceptable to the time. It is as though Teske's search for technical innovation and for new ways of seeing was a search for a mode of existence for himself in a world that would not allow him to be himself. Ultimately, however, this work does not succeed in transcending Teske's personal predicament, and it is hard to agree that his work as a whole belongs with the great photographers of the twentieth century.

This volume contains not only 79 prints by Teske but a comprehensive introduction and essay on his life and work, a transcript of a conversation with George Herms who knew him for over 30 years, a chronology, bibliography, and a list of Teske's exhibitions.