Getty Museum

Facade, Chicago, Composite with Shirley Berman

Date

1940 and 1956; print 1956

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

7b54fb8d-377e-4e3d-8f73-276f4f966d14

This dreamlike image of a female face on the side of a building is the result of two images printed to appear as one. The woman's visage is set against "masculine" elements such as the building's rough exterior, and in the distance, a smokestack and electrical tower. Hanging clothes soften this stark industrial world, and the woman's closed eyes and thoughtful expression set a contemplative mood. Teske photographed the landscape in 1940 in a steel industry shantytown on the outskirts of Chicago. The image is sandwiched with a 1956 negative portraying Shirley Berman, the wife of Wallace Berman, a Beat movement artist and poet. Both were friends of Teske in Los Angeles; he often used Shirley's portrait in composite pictures as an archetypal female figure. For Teske, printing old negatives had a nostalgic and symbolic function. The composite photograph created a timeless, if not idealized, world that would otherwise be out of reach with a more conventional photographic approach. This composite image hints at a psychological state: the realm of the imagination.

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