Val Telberg Photography

Val Telberg was a Surrealist-influenced photomontagist who famously collaborated with Anaïs Nin. Telberg was born of Finnish-Russian parents in Moscow in 1910 and was raised in northern China. He settled in New York City in 1938. A job as a photographer sparked an interest in experimental photography and film and led to study at the Art Students League of New York in early 1940. Around that time, Telberg began experimenting with the multiple-image photographic technique for which he became known. His photomontages, sometimes mural-sized, consisted of layered images of figures in motion and had dreamlike weightlessness associated with Surrealism. He had his first major show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1948. In the mid-1950, he collaborated with Nin, creating images for the 1958 edition of her book The House of Incest. Works by Telberg, who also made paintings, sculptures and films, are part of many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1983, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective of his photomontages.