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Surrealist Poet of the Mind: Val Telberg
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16379 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1989 |
2,299 Words |
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Darwin Marable
Darwin Marable is a photo historian, writer, lecturer, and
independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay area. |
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
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