George Platt Lynes: “José Martinez”

George Platt Lynes, “José ‘Pete’ Martinez”, 1937, Photo Shoot at Lynes’s Studio, Vintage Silver Prints, Private Collections

Born in Mexico in March of 1913, José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga was a ballet dancer who in the early 1940s danced with both the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, precursor ensembles of the New York City Ballet.

José Martinez at a very young age moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After graduating high school, he relocated to New York City where he studied at the School of American Ballet founded in 1934 by Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and George Balanchine. Martinez eventually gained a full scholarship and, upon graduation, was invited to join The Ballet Caravan, a touring company founded by Lincoln Kirstein to provide off-season employment to American ballet dancers. Martinez gradually became involved with the group’s creative process and provided ideas and librettos for ballets.

Martinez eventually began an intimate relationship with Lincoln Kirstein; they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse at St. Luke’s Place. After Kirstein married graphic artist Fidelma Cadmus, the younger sister of artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma moved into the apartment for the first year of the marriage. This triangular romantic relationship was similar to that of their friends, Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening.

José Martinez performed with the Ballet Caravan in the 1941 “Pastorela”, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lew Christensen and dancer José Fernandez, that toured Latin America with great reviews. The work included music by Paul Bowles and traditional songs orchestrated by Blas Galindo with words by Rafael Alvarez. Martinez tried in 1942 to enlist in the Army but was denied. He moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania and began work at a Jewish refugee hostel where writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met through Kirstein in 1939, was already employed. From Isherwood’s diaries, it is known that their relationship, except for one sexual encounter in August of 1942, was platonic.

José Martinez and Christopher Isherwood traveled together several times to New York City to visit the Fidelma and Lincoln Kirstein. They both left Haverford in September of 1942 and went their separate ways. Their friendship, however, continued and they met several times in California and New York after the war years. Called up for service during the Second World War, Martinez was trained at Norfolk, Virginia, and served in the United State Army in northern France until 1945.

As a member of the Ballet Society, Martinez toured the United States with visits in both large and smaller cities. The Society’s repertoire was very different from those trained by Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the Ballets Russes. Martinez danced in the original cast of George Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments” in which he performed the first Theme with Beatrice Tompkins in the 1946 performance tour. He also originated and danced the role of the minister in dancer and choreographer William Dollar’s 1947 “Highland Fling”.

In late 1947, José Martinez suffered a knee injury which forced an end to his performances. Hesitant about the next part of his life, he drifted for a year before beginning life as a dance teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Over the next two decades, Martinez founded dance studios in Ohio and California where he continued to teach ballet until his retirement in the mid-1960s. José Martinez-Berlanga died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on the twenty-fourth of June in 1997 at the age of eight-four.

Notes: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening would spend the summers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s on Fire Island where they painted and took photographs. This collaborative artistic endeavor became known as the PaJaMa collective, taken from the first two letters of their names. Artist George Tooker would later join the collective during the period of 1944 to 1949 when he was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus.

Many friends would often visit the group on Fire Island, among whom were ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artist Bernard Perlin and photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes became acquainted with José Martinez through this group of friends and would also photograph him. Although Martinez appeared in many of the pre-war photographs, Lynes’s studio portraits of Martinez wearing the straw hat are the best known.

The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society has an article entitled “The Fire Island Muses of George Platt Lynes & the PaJaMa Collective” by Brian Ferrari on its site located at: https://www.pineshistory.org/the-archives/fire-island-muses

Top Insert Image: William Caskey, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Print

Second and Bottom Image: Photographers Unknown, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Prints, Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society

Yves Paradis

The Photography of Yves Paradis

Born in Brittany in 1955, Yves Paradis is a French photographer known for his softly rendered black and white photographs which presented an idealized, timeless vision of gay life that differed from the prevailing gay photography of the period. During the 1980s, his work appeared regularly in the most popular gay periodicals of Europe.

The son of a farming family, Yves Paradis spent his formative years in rural France. He was introduced to photography at the age of thirteen by one of his teachers who recognized his struggles with writing. Given a space in the family’s attic by his father for a studio and dark room, Paradis was able to experiment with different techniques and develop his own images. His first photographs were portraits of his friends taken on holidays and, later, fellow soldiers during his national service in the army.

Paradis worked during the 1970s as a photojournalist with a focus on reportage-styled images of current events. Although he still experimented with homoerotic compositions, Paradis did not at this time considered art photography an option for a career. In 1979, France’s first commercially published gay magazine, “Gai Pied”, began its publication. Founded by journalist and activist Jean Le Bitouz, the magazine derived its title from a multilayered French pun that came from the word “guêpier”, meaning hornet’s nest. Paradis submitted a series of photographs he had taken of two soldiers kissing on an army tank; these images were accepted and published as a spread in the magazine.

Beginning in the 1980s, Yves Paradis worked regularly with “Gai Pied” and other European gay publications. His work featured images of sexually attractive men, not necessarily physically perfect, portrayed in realistic and romantic settings. Paradis did not champion the bar and club scene but rather found models through the gay press and random visits to the French provinces. In 1991, the first collection of Paradis’s photography, “Jois de Vivre (Joy of Life)” was published in London by Aubrey Walter. Soon after the volume’s publication, Paradis stopped photographing images and concentrated on individually printing his compositions. In 1998, a second edition of “Jois de Vivre” was published by Éditions Aubrey Walter, GMP Publications.

After a thirty-year hiatus, Paradis produced a new series of photographs in 2021, a collection that continued his original sense of design and disposition. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of Wales and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, United Kingdom. Individual works by Paradis are available through East London’s Henry Miller Fine Art as well as auction house Barbarossa Maison de Ventes, both which are focused on masculine art.

Notes: The Gay Men’s Press, founded in 1979 by Aubrey Walter, David Fernback and Richard Dipple, was the forerunner and the source for the Editions Aubrey Walter imprint which published Yves Paradis first collection of photographs. A short history of the GMP can be found at: https://gmppubs.wordpress.com/a-short-history-of-gay-mens-press/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Yves Paradis”, Portrait for Henry Miller Fine Art

Second Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Jean-Paul et l’Acropole”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Henry Miller Fine Art

Bottom Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Le Jeune Homme aux Pied Nus”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Jimmy DeSana

The Photography of Jimmy DeSana

Born in Detroit in November of 1949, Jimmy DeSana was an American artist and a key figure in New York City’s East Village punk art and New Wave scene in the 1970s and 1980s. His work, as a conceptual artist, conveyed that ers’s radical spirit and initiated a new approach to photographing the human body.

Born James Arthur DeSana, DeSana spent his early years in Atlanta, Georgia. His interest in photography began as a teenager through photographing the city’s suburban landscapes and both friends and acquaintances. DeSana studied at the University of Georgia where he he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1972. For his thesis, he printed the 1972 series “101 Nudes”, a collection of fifty-six halftone black and white photographs of nude and partially nude figures posed inside or just outside houses. The figures, friends as well as himself, were seen from different viewpoints and sometimes only partially. Those partial anatomical views were reminiscent of earlier abstract work created by visual artist Man Ray.

In 1973, Jimmy DeSana relocated to New York City and settled in the vibrant East Village area of Manhattan. As a street photographer doing commercial assignments for magazines as well as occasional record-album commissions, he shot the musicians who habituated late-night clubs and bars. These portraits included punk and New Wave figures such as Debbie Harry, Billy Idol, Richard Hell, Laurie Anderson and others. This commercial work supported DeSana’s photographic artwork in the studio. He was also active in the new correspondence art movement in which artists mailed their work through chain letters. Mailed out in 1973, DeSana’s nude self-portrait was later featured in a 1974 magazine published by the Canada’s conceptual artist collective, General Idea.

In 1978, DeSana’s photographs of the human body were shown in Washington D.C. at the “Punk Art” exhibition sponsored by the Washington Project for the Arts. In 1979, he had his first exhibition at the Stefanotti Gallery on West 57th Street in New York City. In the same year, DeSana published his first collection entitled “Submission”. a volume of surreal, queer and humorous images that situated his life and art within the queer and counterculture experiences. The published volume was created in collaboration with author William S. Burroughs.

In 1980, Jimmy DeSana began to experiment with color photography. His “Suburban” series continued his use of human bodies twisted into androgynous sculptural forms that challenged the viewer. In this series, DeSana began to also photograph commonly found objects in staged surrealistic settings.The images of this exploration of sexuality, gender and consumer issues had almost a nightclub atmosphere with their powerful, almost garish, colors of vibrant greens, pinks and mauves. To create his staged tableaus, DeSana used tungsten lights that imbued the surrealistic scenes with unnatural pigments.

Shortly after 1985, DeSana was diagnosed with HIV and began to experience its symptoms. Continuing his work, he began the “Remainders” series that marked a move from the human body toward abstracted objects. This series featured everyday objects, such as balloons and aluminum foil, seated in dreamlike atmospheres lit in spectral hues.

Jimmy DeSana died, at the age of forty, from an AIDS-related illness at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on the twenty-seventh of July in 1990. He left his estate to photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons who, in collaboration with Salon 94 Gallery, managed the estate for nearly a decade. The DeSana estate is currently co-managed by Simmons and New York City’s contemporary P.P.O.W. Gallery, one of Manhattan’s longest-running galleries now based in the city’s Tribeca district.

The photography volume “Jimmy DeSana: Suburban” was published by Del Monico Books/Brooklyn Museum in 2015 and included texts by filmmaker Laurie Simmons as well as art curators Dan Nadel and Elisabeth Sussman. A 2022 edition entitled “Jimmy DeSana: Submission” was published, also by Del Monico, with texts by Simmons, author Drew Sawyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. The first museum retrospective of DeSana’s work, curated by Simmons and Drew Sawyer, was held in late 2022 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Notes: All images in the header group, unless noted otherwise, are from the Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Top Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Smoke: Self-Portrait”, 1985, Gelatin Silver Print, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Second Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cowboy Boots”, 1984, Vintage Cibachrome Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Third Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, “Cardboard”, 1985, Silver Dye Bleach Print, 48.3 x 32.4 cm, Estate of Jimmy DeSana, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Graduation Cap), 1978, Polaroid Photo, Diego Cortez No Wave Collection, Cornell University

Edmund Teske

The Photography of Edmund Teske

Born in Chicago, Illinois in March of 1911, Edmund Rudolph Teske was an American photographer who along with his portraits produced a prolific volume of experimental photography. For him, photography was more than a way to record a specific moment in time; it was a way to explore the soul of his subjects. Although he was well known among other photographers and participated in many exhibitions, his work was not widely known among the general public.

The eldest son of three children born to Polish emigrant parents, Teske moved at the age of eight with his parents to Wisconsin. It was at this early age that he began to develop his interests in painting and poetry. When the family moved back to Chicago in 1921, Teske began to study music, lessons which concentrated on the piano and saxophone. Encouraged by his elementary school teacher, he began in 1923 to experiment in photography through the school’s facilities. By 1932 Teske was accomplished in the piano to such a degree that he became the protégé of concert pianist Ida Lustagarten.

Edmund Teske had his first solo exhibition of photographs at the Blackstone Theatre, now the Merie Reskin Theater, in the Loop community area of Chicago. In 1933, he began a career in photography working at a Chicago studio. Traveling to New York in 1936, Teske met and received encouragement in his work by American photographer and modern-art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. In the same year he had the opportunity to meet Frank Lloyd Wright at his studio in Wisconsin. At Wright’s invitation in 1938, Teske took up a fellowship in photography to be conducted at Taliesin, Wright’s personal estate in Wisconsin, where he documented Wright’s architectural projects and began experiments with his own photographic work.

Teske’s professional relationship with Wright enhanced his reputation and brought him into contact with such artists as Ansel Adams, portrait and architectural photographer Berenice Abbott and Hungarian constructivist photographer Lászió Moholy-Nagy. Teske taught briefly in the late 1930s with Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus Institute of Design in Chicago and was an assistant at Abbott’s New York studio later in 1939. In the late 1930s, he started a documentary series of Chicago scenes entitled “Portrait of My City” which focused on the social issues of the city.

Although drafted at the beginning of World War II, Edmund Teske failed the medical exam for asocial tendencies and emotional instability, terms often used at that time to disqualify homosexual men. He was instead appointed as an assistant photographer for the Army Corps of Engineers stationed at Illinois’s Rock Island Arsenal where he printed aerial maps for the military. In the early part of 1943, Teske was able to leave his position and, allured by a new life in Hollywood, made the decision to move to Los Angeles.

After a brief working stay at Wright’s Arizona Taliesin West, Teske arrived in Los Angeles in April of 1943. He was hired for Paramount Pictures’s photographic still department and soon joined the artistic and bohemian movement in the city. After a chance meeting with oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, who was a client of Wright, he was invited to live at the Olive Hill estate that Wright had designed for her. Assuming a larger role than that of just caretaker, Teske hosted informal parties and artistic gatherings with such personalities as artist Man Ray, novelist Anaïs Nin, director George Cukor, sculptor Tony Smith, and actors Joel McCrea and Frances Dee.

Among the people that Edmund Teske met during this period was the novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood who introduced Teske to the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. Teske embraced this philosophy with its concept of the connection of life and nature, and its understanding of the existence of time in relation to the larger universe. He also believed in the coexistence of both the masculine and the feminine within every individual. These teachings became a firm basis for his existing view of life and formed a bonding point with Isherwood and the growing Los Angeles gay community.

Teske continued his photographic experiments with manipulated and combined multiple images from which he produced composite prints from sandwiched negatives, prints with solarization to reverse highlight and shadow, and photographic collages. One of the series he produced was “Shiva-Shakti” which featured a nude male overlaid with human faces, landscapes, or abstract subjects. After moving in 1949 to a small studio in Laurel Canyon, Teske became active during the early part of the 1950s with several small, local theater groups. Throughout the 1950s, he experimented with new manipulative and chemical techniques which culminated in 1958 with a new combination of photographic print toning and solarization, later named duotone solarization.

Edmund Teske frequently returned during the 1960s and 1970s to older negatives and reinterpreted them through experimental printing techniques. He participated in more than two dozen group exhibition including the Museum of Modern Art’s 1960 “The Sense of Abstraction” show and was given eighteen solo shows. A colleague of photographer Robert Heineken at the University of California in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Teske taught many of the important photographers of that time, among whom were Aaron Siskind and Judy Dater, and mentored many local photographers. He befriended singer Jim Morrison of The Doors and took a series of informal portraits of Morrison and long term companion Pamela Courson.

During the last twenty years of his life, Teske worked and lived in his East Hollywood studio where he regularly taught workshops. He assembled a comprehensive six-volume autobiographical collection of his work , entitled “Emanations”; however it was never published during his lifetime. In 1994 the Northridge Earthquake severely damaged his studio which forced him to relocate to downtown Los Angeles. Edmund Teske died alone in his home at the age of eighty-five on November 22nd in 1996. A posthumous retrospective of Teske’s photographs was given in 2004 by the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“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. In the days when Greece and Rome ruled the world in arts and letters and philosophy, love of man for man reached openly its pinnacle of beauty. Civilization today, moving forward, must eventually recognize these true facts of love and sex variations.”

–Excerpt from Edmund Teske’s Journal, Published in Julian Cox’s “Spirit into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske”, John Paul Getty Museum, 2004

Note: An informative and more extensive read on the life of Edmund Teske is Rosalind G. Wholden’s article for the February 1964 print issue of ARTFORUM entitled “Edmund Teske: The Camera as Reliquary”. The article can be found online at: https://www.artforum.com/print/196402/edmund-teske-the-camera-as-reliquary-37879

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Edmund Teska”, Date Unknown, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Edmund Teske, “Richard Soakup, Teske’s Lover in Their Chicago Flat”, 1940, Gelatin Silver Print, 20.3 x 19.7 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Edmund Teske, “Jim Morrison and Pam”, 1969, Gelatin Silver Print Composite, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Edmund Teske, “Herb Landegger and Bill Burke, Olive Hill, Hollywood”, 1945, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Elisa Leonelli, “Edmund Teske, Topanga Canyon”, 1976, Gelatin Silver Print