Val Telberg (Vladimir Telberg-von-Teleheim) American, b. Russia, 1910-1995 Born Vladimir Telberg-von-Teleheim in Moscow, Val Telberg was an experimental photographer known for his innovative use of photomontage. After the Russian Revolution his family left the country to live in China, Japan, and Korea. In 1928 Telberg came to the United States to attend Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio. He majored in chemistry, graduating in 1932, then returned to China to pursue a business career. After the invasion of China by Japan in 1938, Telberg moved to New York City. In 1942 he began studying painting at the Art Students League, where he became interested in surrealism and experimental filmmaking. He also developed an interest in photography through several jobs he held, including one that required quickly developing and printing pictures of nightclub patrons and another that involved photographing people with cutout props. In 1945 Telberg bought an enlarger and began combining multiple negatives to make one print. Three years later he exhibited a group of these experimental photomontages at the Brooklyn Museum. Telberg continued his experimentation and in 1951, while living in Europe, worked with 16-mm film montage at Oxford University. During the late 1950s he collaborated with writer Anaïs Nin on one of his best known projects, a series of photomontages illustrating Nin's House of Incest. In the 1960s Telberg began to work with large-scale, multiple-image photographs. As in his earlier work, he sought to create complex images that related to his own thoughts, feelings, memories, and fantasies. In 1968 Telberg moved to Sag Harbor, Long Island, and began making sculpture. He also collaborated with his wife, dancer Lelia Katayen, on multimedia productions. He returned to photography in 1978, and in 1983 his photographs were featured in a one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. M.M.