Val Telberg

Why this artist matters now

Val Telberg was a Russian-American artist whose photographic practice centered on multiple exposures and darkroom montage, combining figures, interiors, and organic textures into composite negatives of hallucinatory density. Working from the mid-twentieth century, his prints occupy a space between document and constructed image, the photographic surface treated less as a record than as a site of accumulation and transformation. His work entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.