Edmund Rudolph Teske (March 7, 1911 – November 22, 1996) was a 20th-century American photographer who combined a career of taking portraits of artists, musicians and entertainers with a prolific output of experimental photography.
[3] During this period he also started work on a sequence of photographs he called Portrait of My City, in which he documented scenes of Chicago with a particular focus on the social issues of the time.
[5] When World War II broke out, Teske was drafted for military duty, but he failed his medical exam for "asocial tendencies, psychoneurosis and emotional instability.
During this time he photographed two of his male co-workers nude while expressing his inner challenges in his journal: Strive to accept the facts of life with courage and serenity to develop talent, as an outlet for emotion, and to find happiness in the world of the mind and spirit.
[2] In early 1943 Teske was able to leave his position at Rock Island, and compelled by the thought of a new way of life and the rising romantic allure of Hollywood, he decided to move to Los Angeles.
He stopped briefly at Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona to photograph the architect's vision there, finally arriving in Los Angeles in April.
He started working in the photographic still department at Paramount Pictures, and he quickly inserted himself into the growing artistic and bohemian movement in the city.
[2] Because of the expansive surroundings of Olive Hill and Teske's newly uninhibited lifestyle, his parties became a magnet for the creative minds of Hollywood and Los Angeles, including Man Ray, Anaïs Nin, George Cukor, Frances Dee, Joel McCrea, Tony Smith and John Whitney.
[2] Teske was fascinated with the Vedanta ideas that all aspects of life and nature are connected and that time exists only as it relates to other moments in a large universe.
Although Teske had photographed nude men throughout his life, this series, with the repeated image of the reclining man, reintroduced "the sensuality of male imagery in his work"[6] in the context of his exploration of Vedantic philosophy.
[2] He met and sometimes taught with many of the important photographers of the time, including Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, Wynn Bullock, Jack Welpott, and Judy Dater.
During the last twenty years of his life Teske both worked and lived in his studio in East Hollywood, where he regularly taught workshops and mentored both younger and older photographers who sought his knowledge about art and philosophy.
In his obituary in the Los Angeles Times, photographic historian Weston Naef wrote that Teske will "enter the history books as the grand master of a style of picture that is taken for granted now that computers have created ways to cut and paste images seamlessly.