Getty Museum

Kenneth Anger, Topanga Canyon, Composite with Gustave Doré Engraving

Date

1954; print 1960s

Medium

Gelatin silver composite print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

>At Pandaemonium, the high capital Of Satan and his peers. Their summons called From every band and squared Regiment By place or choice the worthiest: they anon With hundreds and with thousands trooping came. --John Milton, *Paradise Lost* Stylishly dressed in a dark suit and striped ascot, avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger stands atop a bluff in Topanga Canyon. He is surrounded by an imagined metaphysical event evoking Biblical descriptions of the Apocalypse. Horsemen symbolizing divine wrath trample everything beneath them, as angels blow trumpets to unleash natural disasters. To make this composite print, Edmund Teske combined two negatives-the portrait of his friend and a copy of a Gustave Doré engraving illustrating the work of Anger's favorite poet, John Milton. In the epic poem, *Paradise Lost* , the fallen angel Satan wages war on heaven. This image illustrates a section called "Pandaemonium," literally meaning "all demons" or hell. Teske made this photograph after years of experimentation with various forms of darkroom manipulation. It exemplifies his later style but also suggests Anger's multilayered, "psychedelic" approach to filmmaking. Anger became known for his experimental, homoerotic films, *Fireworks,* *Eaux d'artifice,* and *Scorpio Rising* . An Anger film that Teske collaborated on, *Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome* , covered a similar subject, Dante's *Inferno* .

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