Photo historian, writer, lecturer, and independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area.
Fleeing to Tsingtao
Telberg was born of Russian, Finnish, and Swedish ancestry to a well-to-do family in Moscow in 1910. By the time he was seven, the Russian Revolution was under way. His father, George Gustav Telberg, was prime minister of the last Kolchak government in Siberia. The Telberg family fled to Tsingtao in northern China long after. He remembers life there as difficult, and he was not particularly happy in his new home. In 1928 Telberg got a job on a tramp steamer and left China for the United States, winding up in Springfield, Ohio, at Wittenberg College. He was graduated four years later with a degree in chemistry and returned to China to enter the world of business.
His life fell apart in 1937 when the Japanese--having invaded Manchuria five years earlier--launched a full-scale war in China. After much difficulty, Telberg made his way to New York City. America was in the depths of the Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. Eventually he found a job as an appraiser of Chinese antiques and went on to work for a number of years in a pharmaceuticals company. Rejected for military service in 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War, Telberg suddenly decided to go to art school--his mother had been an aspiring artist and he himself was interested in modern art.
At 32, Telberg enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied painting with men like Morris Kantor, George Grosz, Nahum Tschacvbasov, and Julian Levy. He soon became acquainted with Surrealism and the work of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and the magic realist Peter Blume. This was a time when Surrealism was very big in certain New York circles--Andre Breton, the king of Surrealism, was living there. Telberg found these ideas congenial; the magical imagery seemed an expression of his own temperament. Understandably enough his own paintings were Surrealistic in nature.
During this time Telberg kept himself going by developing negatives and making prints for nightclub and amusement part photographers. In doing this work he became fascinated with accidental double exposures. He soon recognized the artistic potential of the medium. Photography was not yet accepted as a legitimate art form and photographic training was almost nonexistent, so he had to teach himself the necessary techniques. His background as a chemist and sensitivity as an artist led him to various experiments, such as sandwiching negatives in the enlarger, polarizing points, and even dribbling developer on photographic paper like the Abstract Expressionists. Later he came to use two enlargers, producing multiple layers of complex imagery.
It was film, however, especially lap dissolves and fade-ins and fadeouts that really influenced Telberg's evolution as a photographer. Films like Jean Cocteau's seminal Blood of a Poet (1930) were crucial to his development. The filmmaker created subjective feelings through a series of montages. An artist is seen painting at an easel; suddenly lips appear on his canvas. He tries to efface them; they appear on his hand. Finally he manages to throw them out the window. When he wakes next day the lips have come back. Then the artist walks through a mirror, a recurrent theme in Cocteau films, and floats in darkness, fear, voyeurism, suicide, murder, and a variety of surreal scenes ensue.
Telberg also cites as a major influence Maya Deren's haunting silent film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). The film opens with a woman, Maya Deren, entering her home. The cameras move in to frame her eye closing. We cut to a series of montages of nightmare-like scenes in which she attempts to catch a mysterious hooded figure. At the end of the film the woman dies.
Many years later, Telberg worked as cameraman on Ian Hugo's film Melodic Inversion (c.1960) and superimposed images by using two projectors. He then filmed the multiple images, a technique he also used in his photography. Although he used the techniques of solarization and multiple printing in both media, Telberg believed that cinema was really the superior medium.
Telberg says that the idea of combining images came to him through "serendipity" as he juggled negatives together on a light table. For example, in one of the earliest of those images, Untitled (1946), he combined the negative of a prostrate nude woman with a woman's face. The lips and eye--perhaps influenced by the films of Cocteau and Deren--are imprinted on her lower torso, thus creating an effective, compelling image. Telberg also received support and encouragement for his erotic themes from Tschacbasov, his former teacher at the Art Students League, who was deeply interested in psychiatry as a means of freeing inhibitions.
Future Explorations
In another more complex image, Return to Summer Group, Palmetto Gnome (Variation #1) (c.1948), Telberg combined several negatives in the enlarger to show a woman's face printed on the dark outline of a hand. Palm leaves read as her hair and shoulders. Telberg was beginning to experiment with a wide variety of photographic techniques that foreshadowed his future explorations.
Although Telberg's major influences and support were from painters, poets, and filmmakers, he was well aware of photographer Laughlin's work. In time, he discovered Man Ray's photography through French magazines, primarily the publication RARS, when he moved to France in 1948. Man Ray's Surrealist and inventive imagery reinforced Telberg's thinking, providing him with a bridge to already established European tradition.
In Possession of a Dream Which Becomes the World (1949) he introduced words on an independent but equal basis with the photograph, as Breton had done earlier in Nadja, his Surrealist novel (1928). (Breton incorporated forty-four Surreal photographs of people, places, and objects with the text). Telberg's solarized photograph of a sleeping woman caressed by two hands is abstract, but engaging. The words in the text are not descriptive, but express rather the mood and nuance of the visual image. A poetic interplay is set up between the words and the image--quite an innovation for the time. Years later Telberg resurrected this idea to illustrate Anais Nin's book House of Incest.
Telberg's collection of memories, many painful, became the subject matter for his "visual diary." His autobiography includes examples of love, hate, fear, misery, and ugliness, facets of life that he feels are as real and as relevant as beauty. Telberg knew the terror of war as a child in Russia, witnessing a man being killed with the butt of a rifle. He saw people on the way to their execution, saw the wounded. He was also witness to the Japanese invasion of China. It is not surprising that his horror and sense of injustice comes out in his photographs. In Harbinger of Rebellion (c.1950) he recalls his fears and memories, expressing them as "primordial tears." Clouds of war arise to merge into the outline of a woman within which a man stands with arms outstretched to protest the air raids.
Sometimes, more than art is needed to soothe the psyche. After the breakup of his first marriage in the early 1950s, Telberg found emotional support for several years by undergoing psychoanalysis. While analysis did not dramatically influence his imagery, this period of introspection provided him with a basis to further explore his inner life. Past, present, and future are often merged in his imagery, just as they are in the mind--there is no sense of time in the unconscious. Moreover, the simultaneity of events in time and space are one of his special concerns. Paris in 1950 and New York in 1970 coexist in his images, which merge distant geographical locations and disparate times. His overlays of imagery suggest various levels of consciousness as he moves metaphorically from darkness to the light.
Dreamlike Images
Anais Nin knew Telberg's work through her husband, the filmmaker Ian Hugo, and asked Telberg to illustrate the new edition of her prose poem House of Incest (1958). As with the earlier photograph possession of a Dream, the text and images coexist. His images do not describe her text, but rather, as Telberg puts it, "I sing a song to her text." Telberg's images seem dreamlike, floating in the air as her images do. In view of the act that Nin was an analysand of Otto Rank, the noted psychoanalyst, and at one time was herself a lay analyst, it is not surprising that psychoanalysis was a lifelong interest that profoundly influenced her fiction. In House of Incest the characters in her nightmare are trapped in a darkened house because of their inner conflicts. The only one to break free is a dancer who by accepting her flaws can then dance away to the light outside. Telberg, too, frequently uses dancers and figures in his composites who emerge out of the darkness. Commenting on Telberg's photography, Nin observed, "It is a spiritual x-ray, a vision which not only includes the physical substance of realism but transcends it and presents us simultaneously with the dream, the relativity of time, the improvisations, the extensions into past, present, and future, memory, divination and interpretation happening simultaneously."
The nude, Telberg's symbol for vulnerability and eternal love, a male silhouette or shadow, and a cloudy sky are all effectively juxtaposed in Construction with Air and People (1956). It seems very Surrealist the way the elements seem to float on the picture plane. Telberg himself has said, "I think that Surrealism opened up a whole vista for imagination, for example, Dali and Magritte." For "they brought about the acceptance of absurdity and the unexpected to the art world." Telberg has never incorporated his dreams into his images, but rather invents dreams from the raw elements of reality. The ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary as if in a dream.
In 1968 Telberg left New York City with his family and bought a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island. With beaches and forests nearby, he began using objects he found--driftwood, stones, shards--to create sculpture, at times even affixing the photographic image onto his sculpture, again joining the real with fantasy. Not entirely satisfied with the results, in 1978 he resumed his photography, his real forte.
Creating Montages
During these years Telberg dramatically increased the scale of his images and even became involved in multimedia productions with his wife, Lelia Katayen, a dancer. His lifelong interest in cinema was resurfacing. For example, Event in Golgatha (1966-1970) measures approximately 72 by 14 inches and reads like a strip of film. The stream of characters meander from top to bottom and include many of his unique characteristics: a nude, levitating and upside-down figures, and the Crucifixion, for Telberg, a symbol of oppression. Although Telberg first created montages in Paris around 1950, it was in these larger images that he freely cut and reassembled photographs and then pasted them onto illustration board. There are other equally large and durable images from this period, but this one seems to be the most significant and memorable.
In 1982, and after a year's efforts, Telberg completed a sixteen foot-long serial image. He joined images of a local street fair; Muscle Beach, California; children diving from trees into a trout pond; portraits; interiors; and nude studies; resulting in one truly monumental image. The sense of movement and narrative are obvious and almost seem to relate to a stream of consciousness. More recently, in Events, Nights, Days, Years (1986-87) Telberg integrated Xerox images and drawings with his photographs, resulting in three 30-inch by 40-inch panels of negative images that incorporated many of his characteristic elements.
Although Telberg's photography is not always recognized, especially by the younger generation, he has had a number of one-person exhibitions since 1948 at many notable galleries and museums. His last major exhibition was in 1983 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Telberg's photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among others.
Telberg was one of the few pioneers to break with the American tradition of the conventional photograph, not out of malice or defiance, but rather because multiple imaginary seemed the most effective way of expressing his life experiences. He wanted to bare his emotions as reactions to his youthful world, a world of fear, uncertainty, war, revolution and death. Telberg has poignantly observed, "Although a conventional photograph may record every physical fact of a scene exactly as it registers on the retina of the eye, it does not record the scene as the mind visualizes it, fusing the things that are seen with memories they may evoke of another time, a different place."
Telberg was part of a stream in America photography beginning in the late 1930s and 1940s that by the 1970s had turned into a positive river of photographic experimentation that critics, galleries, and museums could no longer ignore. A new generation of photographers--Jerry Uelsmann, Van Deren Coke, and Robert Fichter, to name a few--also reveal the poetry of the mind and not just the image on the eye.
http://www.worldandi.com
Surrealist Poet of the Mind: Val Telberg
Article # : 16379
Category : THE ARTS > PHOTOGRAPHY
Issue Date : 5 / 1989 File Size : 2,299 Words Page : 180
Author : Darwin Marable
