Vladimir Telberg-von-Teleheim, better known as Val Telberg, was born in Russia and grew up in China. Yet he is thoroughly American. Along with his contemporaries--George Platt Lynes, Barbara Morgan, Edmund Teske, and Clarence John Laughlin--Telberg is responsible for both challenging and disrupting the mainstream of American photography. Neither Edward Weston's vision nor documentary photography appealed to him or reflected his experience, temperament, and vision. Telberg's ties are to the inner landscape of mind and consciousness, an attraction that aligned him closely with the Surrealists.
Fleeing to Tsingtao
Telberg was born of Russian, Finnish, and Swedish ancestry to a well-to-do family in Moscow in 1910. By the time he was seven, the Russian Revolution was under way. His father, George Gustav Telberg, was prime minister of the last Kolchak government in Siberia. The Telberg family fled to Tsingtao in northern China long after. He remembers life there as difficult, and he was not particularly happy in his new home. In 1928 Telberg got a job on a tramp steamer and left China for the United States, winding up in Springfield, Ohio, at Wittenberg College. He was graduated four years later with a degree in chemistry and returned to China to enter the world of business.
His life fell apart in 1937 when the Japanese--having invaded Manchuria five years earlier--launched a full-scale war in China. After much difficulty, Telberg made his way to New York City. America was in the depths of the Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. Eventually he found a job as an appraiser of Chinese antiques and went on to work for a number of years in a pharmaceuticals company. Rejected for military service in 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War, Telberg suddenly decided to go to art school--his mother had been an aspiring artist and he himself was interested in modern art.
At 32, Telberg enrolled at the Art Students League, where he studied painting with men like Morris Kantor, George Grosz, Nahum Tschacvbasov, and Julian Levy. He soon became acquainted with Surrealism and the work of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and the magic realist Peter Blume. This was a time when Surrealism was very big in certain New York circles--Andre Breton, the king of Surrealism, was living there. Telberg found these ideas congenial; the magical imagery seemed an expression of his own temperament. Understandably enough his own paintings were Surrealistic in nature.
During this time Telberg kept himself going by developing negatives and making prints for nightclub and amusement part photographers. In doing this work he became fascinated with accidental double exposures. He soon recognized the artistic potential of the medium. Photography was not yet accepted as a legitimate art form and photographic training was almost nonexistent, so he had to teach himself the necessary techniques. His background as a chemist and sensitivity as an artist led him to various experiments, such as sandwiching negatives in the enlarger, polarizing points, and even dribbling developer on photographic paper like the Abstract Expressionists. Later he came to use two enlargers, producing multiple layers of complex imagery.
It was film, however, especially lap dissolves and fade-ins and fadeouts that really influenced Telberg's evolution as a photographer.
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