Myriad layers in a simple alchemy

Simplicity was often the most powerful tool in the aesthetic arsenal of Los Angeles artist Edmund Teske (1911-1996). That’s the small surprise in the revealing if rather uneven survey exhibition of the photographer’s work on view through Sept. 26 at the J. Paul Getty Museum

Teske is not known for lack of embellishment -- just the opposite. He is known for having layered negatives and chemically manipulated photographs with abandon. His darkroom effects seemed to court a visual alchemy that might turn the “base metal” of camera work into the imaginative artistic “gold” once reserved for painting.

The standard photographic reference books will tell you that Teske invented a mysterious, one-of-a-kind printing process called duotone solarization. By exposing a negative or fresh print to bright light, the process reverses the light and dark tones of the black-and-white picture; with photochemicals, it creates chance effects of streaking and staining, often leaving residues in purple, russet, orange-gold and other deep colors.

Nor is simplicity the hallmark of perhaps his most familiar single work -- a pictorial homage to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Teske worked on the jampacked image for nearly seven years, beginning in 1936. In the interim, he moved from Chicago to L.A., where Aline Barnsdall became his patron. (He lived for several years in a studio residence at Barnsdall’s famous house, Hollyhock, which Wright designed.) The photograph looks something like a Victorian engraving -- dark, fussy and forbidding. Teske started it at 25, and it’s the work of a young artist grandly attempting a Big Statement.

The architect is shown looming on a modern Parnassus. He’s wedged between his greatest building, the rural Pennsylvania house Fallingwater, which juts out above him, and a swirling river of humanity that rushes by below. The version at the Getty, printed in the 1970s, is a dramatic extravaganza filled with portents (catch the godhead floating in the clouds). Whenever I see it, I think of “Citizen Kane” -- done in Super 8.

By stark contrast, a stunning 1943 photograph of a young man posed on a downtown L.A. street demonstrates the level of complexity Teske could get just by aiming his camera. Its simplicity is deceptive. The figure study tells a story both public and personal. Furthermore, its implied narrative is ripped from the headlines yet simultaneously set in an ancient historical context.

Young “Ramon” is shown dressed in work clothes -- dungarees cuffed at the boot and a white T-shirt with rolled sleeves. The T-shirt, not tucked in, recalls a doublet, the close-fitting jackets worn by Italian aristocrats during the Renaissance. This modern blue-collar version draws a sharp line of contrast against the dark pants, cutting across the young man’s hips and accentuating the sensuality of his stance.

He stands in a classic contrapposto -- feet apart, right leg straight and left leg bent at the knee. The pose twists the figure on a vertical axis. His slanted hips turn left, while his shoulders and head both turn right. Ramon is all coiled energy, dynamic intensity held in check. Think Michelangelo’s “David,” poised and ready to meet the advancing challenge of an unseen Goliath.

Teske photographed the youth on a street corner. The street opens away in back of him, so that sunshine lights the figure from behind. The front of his body is shaded, his right side picked out by gleaming sunlight. Ramon virtually glows like an ember, as if surrounded by a luminous corona.

Rear lighting also causes his torso-defining white shirt to be reflected in the window of the shabby storefront behind him. This reflection, severed at the neck and just below the buttocks, creates the apparition of an ancient Greek or Roman torso carved from the purest marble.

Suddenly, we find ourselves transported to the museum of the street. A handsome young man is deftly likened to classic images of male pulchritude, stretching back from the peak of the Renaissance to the pinnacles of antiquity. Ramon metamorphoses before your eyes into a New World Apollo.

Teske spells out, literally, his own homoerotic attraction to this transformed youth. Framed in the shop window at the upper right are two giant capital letters: US. That pretty much says it all.

But not quite. The careful cropping prevents a viewer from knowing what the window’s sign actually says. As initials for the United States, however, they also allude to the photograph’s back story.

Teske, born and raised a second-generation German immigrant in working-class Chicago, arrived at Union Station in June 1943. He walked right into the turmoil surrounding the zoot suit riots, which started that spring and peaked on the night of June 7. Some 5,000 local civilians -- mostly white -- and Marines, sailors and soldiers from around the U.S. on their way to war in the Pacific gathered on Main Street, in Boyle Heights and in other downtown neighborhoods to attack Mexican American kids.

Social mores of the day required people of color to stay largely unseen and unheard in public. A strutting teenager’s zoot suit, defined by extreme style and exaggeration -- those peaked lapels! those pegged balloon pants! -- pretty much flouted that unwritten demand.

The marauders were determined to shut them up. The City Council banned the clothing. Newspapers cheered them on.

Teske’s photograph recasts the tale of David and Goliath in Chicano terms -- not unlike Michelangelo had done with his commanding statue to represent the small but powerful city-state of Florence, which was always being threatened by bigger adversaries. And Teske, again like his Renaissance predecessor, drew on his own homosexuality to endow his art with an irrepressible human vitality -- not to mention empathy for his subject’s social fate.

Sexual identity is central to Teske’s art. I don’t just mean he photographed men in sensual terms, though he did a fair bit of that; I mean that he used the camera as an agent for intimate relations with the world.

Teske was both shy and independent. He could hold the world close in a photograph and, at the same time, keep it at arm’s length, shaping its contours and courting its unexpected beauties. In Teske’s hands, the viewfinder frames yet isolates, consecrating a personal relationship.

The Getty exhibition, organized by associate curator Julian Cox, assembles 119 works (all but 11 from the museum’s collection) plus letters, ephemera and other photographs. Many of the earliest pictures were acquired this year. One youthful self-portrait shows the artist as a fleeting shadow on a wall, merged with a city skyline; another catches his reflection in a lightbulb.

The most beautiful of the Chicago photographs is a 1940 portrait of his lover, Richard Soakup, smudged with grime from working on an automobile. The young man is pushed to the composition’s foreground, wedged into a shallow space created by the car behind him. The car, raised on blocks, evokes a romantic hero’s rearing steed.

Teske repeated this squeezed composition often, as in a picture of mannequins in a department store, shot so the statues are wedged between the photographer’s camera and the store window behind them. Whether mechanic or mannequin, the figure occupies a controlled envelope of pictorial space.

The result is that the subject seems suspended within the photograph, like a fly in amber. Teske matches the image’s lyrical sensuality by emphasizing the physical qualities of the photographic print, manipulated in the darkroom. Sometimes the effect feels creepy -- sinister and bleak -- with the photograph functioning as a talisman or fetish. But the work seeks a fluid mythology of universal connection, and making art becomes an act of redemption.

The Getty presentation emphasizes early work. Nothing here was printed after the 1970s. (Teske died at 85 in 1996.) More than half the pictures date from the 1930s and 1940s, and a handful are from the 1950s. Later, Teske used negatives from these decades as if they were found objects -- historical artifacts he manipulated in the studio to make fresh pictures. Everything old was new again.

Speaking of which, the most disappointing feature of the show is the Getty’s reticence in addressing the inescapable centrality of Teske’s homosexuality to his art. It’s all over the pictures, but it dare not speak its name in most of the show’s didactic labels, wall texts and handout brochure. (Go to the catalog for a fuller accounting.) Sometimes in these rooms, it feels like 1954, not 2004; you long for a few bursts of light to make fresh pictures.

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‘Spirit Into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske’

Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays

Ends: Sept. 26

Price: Parking $5

Contact: (310) 440-7300