About

A self-taught artist, Edmund Teske worked for a commercial photography studio in Chicago in the 1930s. Over the years he sought out and met Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, László Moholy-Nagy and many other members of the Bauhaus/School of Design. Attracted by Hollywood, in 1943 Teske moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a performer and photographer before joining the UCLA faculty in 1965 at Heinecken’s invitation. Teske was awarded a NEA Fellowship in 1975, and honored with a solo exhibition at the Getty Museum in 1993, and a major retrospective there in 2004. Monographs of Teske’s work include Spirit into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske (Getty, 2004), Being and Becoming: Photographs by Edmund Teske (Getty, 1993), and Images from Within: The Photographs of Edmund Teske (Friends of Photography, 1980).