i love Jürgen´s photos. All the amazing campaigns he has been doing for Marc Jacobs, working perfectly with matt-washed-out tones and the locations of the pics. All seems a bit like film stills taken from very unique experiences. There is this enigmatic stuff that catches your attention, there is always a story behind each pick and thats really cool. Sometimes i´ve had conversations where, in order to have a new editorial, the content of the shooting is a MUST. If there is no content what do we have? Its true that beauty could also be a content by itself but is also true that without a visual story to develop what you get is not exactly complete. Or maybe its my opinion because i dont come from fashion but from an editorial work based on telling visual stories with photos and text. Jürgen is amazing at that, all those pages in the "Die Zeit" suplement every saturday in München plus the early work he did together with his then partner the stylist and now photographer Venetia Scott,-whose sense of aesthetics is simply extraordinary-, remains today so fresh and exciting.
Here is the story behind this pick "w", taken in 2006.
" A beautiful woman, alone and vulnerable, dressed in a tight skirt, laced corset and dizzily high-heeled shoes. The outfit signifies either a classic hooker or very high fashion at the turn of the 21st century. And Juergen Teller is the photographer- a raw, young talent whose work first appeared in the grunge music press in London in the late 1980´s and was rapidly welcomed into the fashion world, where his photographs of dangerously thin models with tattered clothes became closely associated with the style of heroin chic. The school is now discredited, in part due to the death-by-drugs of some of its brightest young stars. Teller survived, because his method had little to do with fashion and a lot to do with story telling. Even before he saw the clothes for a shoot, he and his partner Venetia Scott created a scenario, and a character, and thought of the assignment almost as a movie, "a day in the life of that character". He sees his role as the one who releases the viewers into a world they could not reach alone. "I want to make people able to dream through the pictures. They should provide a mean to take your fantasies further. I want you to be able to see not a piece of clothing but a characterisation that´s interesting and inspiring".
From Acne Paper, 2009.