Val Telberg

Though hardly the first to double-expose photographs, Telberg was one of the first photographers to experiment with multiple imagery in depth, and in the early 1940’s was one of a minority of highly creative photographers who sought to use conventional photographic techniques in pursuit of a higher, more imaginative goal. By combining human forms from models in this studio with random external elements from the outside world, Val Telberg created a world of dreams, fantasy, hyper reality and the subconscious in his photographs. When asked about his work on the occasion of his Brooklyn Museum show, Val said, “the pictures should be felt rather than pronounced, and an effort to translate them into words may only bring on frustration.”

Val Telberg (1910-1995) was born in Moscow of Finnish-Russian parents, raised in China, and came to the United States when the war with Japan was at hand. He was given a one-man show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948, and a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1983. His work was also included in several of Edward Steichen’s important group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950’s, and his photographs are in the collections of MoMA, the Getty, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.