Getty Museum

[Tree Study, Olive Hill, Hollywood]

Creator

American Photographer · 1911–1996

Maker

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

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Date: negative 1945; print 1960s
Medium: Solarized gelatin silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Edmund Teske was introduced to Olive Hill, Aline Barnsdall's estate in the center of Hollywood, shortly after he moved to Los Angeles. His attraction to the trees on the estate grew out of his reverence for nature. The reversed tones and varied colors of brown and dark red were achieved by twice exposing the printing paper to light: first while under the negative (made twenty years earlier) in the enlarger and a second time while the print was wet with the developing chemicals. At the second stage of development, the print reacted to the light and changed color from gray to russet, brown, and reddish brown in a process Teske called duotone solarization. His manipulation of the tones produced a sense of mystery and foreboding in the landscape.

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