Background
Edmund Teske was born on March 7, 1911, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the eldest of three children born to Rudolph and Olga Teske. His parents were from Poland.
1976
Edmund Teske at Topanga Corrall (c) Elisa Leonelli
Edmund Teske was born on March 7, 1911, in Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the eldest of three children born to Rudolph and Olga Teske. His parents were from Poland.
When Edmund Teske was 8 years old his family moved to Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, where they took up farming. During this period he developed his first artistic interests by experimenting with painting and poetry.
In 1921 his family moved back to Chicago, and Edmund Teske began to study music, primarily the piano and saxophone. Two years later his grammar school teacher, Mabel Morehouse, introduced him to photography and let him develop his own photos in the school darkroom.
For the next decade, he spent most of his free time practicing both the piano and photography, and by 1932 he was accomplished enough in the piano that he became the protégé of concert pianist Ida Lustgarten. At the same time, his photographic skills had advanced to the point that he was given his first one-man exhibition at the Blackstone Theatre in Chicago.
The following year Edmund Teske began to pursue photography as a career and worked full-time at a Chicago studio called Photography Inc. In 1936 he traveled to New York to meet with Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged and inspired him. That same year he met Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin studio in Wisconsin. At Wright's invitation, Edmund Teske created a photographic workshop within Taliesin to artistically document Wright's many architectural projects and to explore new relationships between architecture and photography. During Teske's many visits to Taliesin, Wright and other artists and musicians who stayed there helped Edmund Teske form his ideas about the role of artists in society and the importance of imparting social messages in his work.
Over the next five years, Edmund Teske met and sometimes worked with some of the greatest photographers of the time, including Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, László Moholy-Nagy, and Berenice Abbott. He taught briefly with Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, and in 1939 he worked as an assistant in Berenice Abbott's studio in New York. During this period he also started work on a sequence of photographs he called Portrait of My City, in which he documented scenes of Chicago with a particular focus on the social issues of the time.
When World War II broke out, Edmund Teske was drafted for military duty, but he failed his medical exam for "asocial tendencies, psychoneurosis, and emotional instability." These were thought to have been medical code words to indicate his growing sexual interests in other men. As an alternative to military service, Edmund Teske was appointed by the War Department to work as an assistant photographer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois, where he printed aerial maps for military use.
In early 1943 Edmund Teske was able to leave his position at Rock Island, he decided to move to Los Angeles. He stopped briefly at Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona to photograph the architect's vision there, finally arriving in Los Angeles in April. Edmund Teske started working in the photographic still department at Paramount Pictures, and he quickly inserted himself into the growing artistic and bohemian movement in the city.
Edmund Teske began to experiment with the concept that a regular photographic image could not define a moment in life and that only multiple images portrayed together could convey what he called "universal essences." Throughout the rest of his life, he continued to produce composite prints made by sandwiching two or more negatives together. Many of these images are now his signature photographs. During this time he also experimented with a variety of other photographic techniques, including solarization and collages.
In 1949 Edmund Teske launched a series of creative photographic experiments in which he both manipulated and combined multiple images to create "new pictorial realities".
In 1959 the Museum of Modern Art purchased nine of his prints, further escalating his fame within the photographic world. The 1960s and '70s were the busiest time in his career. During this period he was given at least eighteen one-man exhibitions and took part in more than two dozen other group exhibitions.
Edmund Teske met and sometimes taught with many of the important photographers of the time, including Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Wynn Bullock, Jack Welpott, and Judy Dater. During this period he also befriended Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, and took a series of informal portraits of Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela Courson.
During the last twenty years of his life, Edmund Teske both worked and lived in his studio in East Hollywood, where he regularly taught workshops and mentored both younger and older photographers who sought his knowledge about art and philosophy.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged Teske's studio, and Edmund Teske was forced to move out. Edmund Teske was living by himself in downtown Los Angeles when he died in his bed on November 22, 1996.
Edmund Teske started working in Paramount Pictures, and he quickly inserted himself into the growing artistic and bohemian movement. Edmund Teske met Aline Barnsdall, a wealthy client of Wright, and she invited him to live in a part of a large and then unfinished project called Olive Hill that Wright had begun for Barnsdall but had never finished due to differences of opinion about the design and the cost. She intended him to be caretaker for the property, but Edmund Teske soon assumed a much larger role. He started hosting informal parties. Edmund grew a beard and "took on the trappings of a bohemian lifestyle." His parties became a magnet for the creative minds of Hollywood and Los Angeles, including Man Ray, Anaïs Nin, George Cukor, Frances Dee, Joel McCrea, Tony Smith, and John Whitney.
During this time Edmund Teske met Christopher Isherwood, who introduced him to the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. He soon embraced the philosophy, in part because its teachings provided a grounding for how he already viewed life and in part because Isherwood and his friends were already part of the growing gay community in the city. Edmund Teske was fascinated with the Vedanta ideas that all aspects of life and nature are connected and that time exists only as it relates to other moments in a large universe.
As a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship (1936), Teske began to photograph several of the houses Wright designed (1938).
Quotes from others about the person
In his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, photographic historian Weston Naef wrote that Teske will "enter the history books as the grandmaster of a style of picture that is taken for granted now that computers have created ways to cut and paste images seamlessly."