Edmund Teske
| Edmund Teske | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 7, 1911 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | November 22, 1996 (aged 85) Los Angeles, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Photography |
Edmund Rudolph Teske (March 7, 1911 – November 22, 1996) was a 20th-century American photographer who combined a career of taking portraits of artists, musicians and entertainers with a prolific output of experimental photography. His use of techniques like: combined prints, montages and solarizations led to "often romantic and mysterious images". Although he exhibited extensively and was well-known within artistic photography circles during his lifetime, his work was not widely known by the public. He has been called "one of the forgotten greats of American photography."
Teske was born in Chicago, the eldest of three children born to Rudolph and Olga Teske. His parents were from Poland. When he was 8 years old his family moved to Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, where they took up farming. During this period Teske developed his first artistic interests by experimenting with painting and poetry.
In 1921 his family moved back to Chicago, and 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 on 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 he 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 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 Teske form his ideas about the role artists in society and the importance of imparting social messages in his work.
The professional relationship with Wright greatly enhanced Teske's reputation, and over the next five years 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 Abbott's studio in New York. During this same period he 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. He also was introduced to the photographs of Man Ray, which inspired him to create his own new images that contained positive and negative elements.
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