Curated by Julian Cox

One of the great oddballs of American photography, Edmund Teske (1911–96) remains best known for complex, mostly abstract darkroom concoctions that owe a large debt to the Surrealist faith in happy accident. Streaked and stained to the point of muddiness, these prints nevertheless helped to inspire a wave of process-oriented photography on the West Coast in the ’70s. Now the Getty is looking at the whole of Teske’s career: These 115 images, taken over a forty-year period, reveal that his chops extended to social documentation, nudes, portraiture, and architectural views. Roughly seventy-five of these are being shown for the first time. Whether they call for a reconsideration of Teske’s place in the margins of twentieth-century photography is a question this show should answer.

— Andy Grundberg