Getty Museum
Cactus, Taliesin West, Arizona
Creator
Edmund TeskeAmerican Photographer · 1911–1996
All works by this person →Edmund Teske credited a grammar school teacher with inspiring his interest in photography. He received his first box camera around 1920. During his adolescence he studied drawing, painting, and music; when he graduated from high school, he built his own darkroom in the basement of the family home. In 1934 Teske took a position as an assistant in a commercial photographic studio in Chicago. He went
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- negative 1943; print 1960s
- Medium
- Solarized gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
In order to achieve results that he called "consistent with a finer feeling of emulsion as plastic pigment," Edmund Teske manipulated the photographic print in the darkroom, achieving the otherworldly effects seen here. The negative was made at Taliesin West, the Arizona studio of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom Teske worked. The cholla cactus reverberates with energy. This effect was created by Teske's use of the solarization process, which causes each prickly thorn to appear electrified. Teske handled the medium of photography fluidly, experimenting with techniques that allowed him to transform an ordinary negative into an image imbued with mystical possibilities.
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