If you haven’t been living in a cave for the past 20 something years and you know a little bit about fashion photography, then you must have heard of Juergen Teller. And even if you are not familiar with the name, I can bet on almost anything that you have seen his work somewhere, sometime.

Teller has done so much that it is almost impossible to wrap everything up in a couple of lines: from his early work, photographing the music scene in the 80’s and 90’s, including names like Kurt Cobain, Sinéad O’Connor and Elton John, to his later and current collaborations with mostly every notable fashion house, designer, A-list celebrity and cutting edge style publication.

Kurt Cobain, Berlin, 1991
photo itsnicethat.com

Juergen Teller was born in 1964 in Germany, where he studied photography for two years. In his effort to avoid military national service, he learned English and moved to London in 1986, where he started working for record companies, making photographs for record covers, one of which was the cover of Sinéad O’Connor’s single Nothing Compares 2 You that pushed him into the London art scene, got him noticed and catapulted his photography career.

Mother with Crocodile, Bubenreuth, Germany 2002
photo vogue.co.uk

From then on Teller was unstoppable, managing to blur the line between art, advertising and portraiture and transforming himself into one of the world’s most admired and in-demand photographers of the moment.

“Juergen Teller: Woo” is one of his most recent exhibitions, which was on display at the ICA in London from 23 January to 17 March 2013. His first solo London show in 9 years has been a resounding hit, packing the two floors of the gallery while also generating a stir within the UK press, especially around the centerpiece of the exhibition: the three enormous nude portraits of his long time friend and collaborator Vivienne Westwood. The 68 year old British fashion designer dropped all her clothes, aside from a delicate necklace, just for Teller, and as he also states, she would have most likely said no to any other photographer.

Vivienne Westwood
itsnicethat.com

The level of trust he builds with his subjects before photographing them is always evident. The subjects shown in this exhibition are fully exposed, a kind of Teller trademark: Lily Cole naked in a rat infested garbage heap in India, the famously reclusive Bjork floating in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon and giving a loving look to her son, and charming pictures of the artist’s baby boy, Ed.

Bjork and son, Iceland, 1993
photo vogue.co.uk

Smiling Ed
photo lehmannmaupin.com

But Juergen Teller never forgets his sense of humor: you can find Kate Moss having a rest in a wheelbarrow, the already iconic shot of Victoria Beckham with her legs popping out of a Marc Jacobs bag, his mother with the jaws of a crocodile and even a smoking cat.

Kate Moss, Gloucestershire, 2010
photo lehmannmaupin.com

His shots are joyfully genre-less, not taken for the sake of fashion or art, but to catch life and pinpoint love. That sense of reality comes from his distinctive use of the camera’s flash, which gives his pictures a bleached-out brightness, and creates the impression as though there is nowhere to hide. By using a flash, Teller suggests that there is nothing stagey and therefore phony about his images, but at the same time his pictures tend to be carefully staged, though not posed.

Victoria Beckham
photo nytimes.com

There is also a selection of books and tear sheets from Teller’s advertising work and even a section dedicated to angry complaint letters that were addressed to Teller when he wrote a weekly column in the German magazine, Die Zeit. The space is plastered from floor-to-ceiling with extracted full-length magazine pages that depict his pictorial spreads alongside early advertising campaigns for the likes of Miu Miu, Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Lang.

Installation view
photo lehmannmaupin.com

Through Teller’s non-commercial photography themes like family, history and nationhood pop up. The ICA show features a wall of pictures of his mother – who married the photographer’s uncle after his father’s suicide – in the woods near Teller’s childhood home. He also photographs plants growing in the cracks in the wall of Deutsches Stadion, the arena built by Albert Speer to hold Nazi rallies, and which was a place of simultaneous fear and attraction when Teller was a child.

Juergen Teller in the gallery
photo nymag.com

Juergen Teller’s photography is instantly recognizable through the subtle uses of humor, self mockery and emotional honesty and if you’re disgusted or offended by it then you haven’t understood him properly. In that note, I’ll leave you with a short video of Woo at the ICA and with a seemingly controversial statement by the artist, given a couple of years back: “Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy, which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man. She’s so retouched, so airbrushed, without any human response at all, and, well, you don’t really want to fuck a doll.” Teller, Juergen and NY Mag (Interviewer). “Straight Shooter.” in: New York Magazine. Fall 2008. (English).

by Alexandra Mateescu

Alexandra Mateescu is a photo-video junkie who left her imaginary super successful forensics career in favor of the University of Arts. She frequently gets mistaken with a 16 year old high school girl so you’ll never catch her without her ID, she has a strong passion for the 80’s, and her kind of art must be funny and a little bit ironic.

http://www.behance.net/alexandra_mateescu