Juergen Teller’s photo dump

Chatting with fashion’s most based photographer.

A couple months ago, I wrote about how fashion images (and advertising images in general) have been transformed by our universal access to photography. It birthed a theory I call iPhone Wabi-Sabi: In a world where almost anyone can take (or prompt) a “good” photograph, craft becomes less crucial and the real currency of the image becomes a matter of transmitting meaning or vibes.

It was impossible to formulate this theory without thinking of Juergen Teller, who, long before the invention of the iPhone, found a special rip in the cultural ether that allowed him to turn fashion photography into his own semi-autobiographical playground. What jumps out in Teller’s most iconic photographs is the being-there-ness of them. Whether he’s putting Victoria Beckham in a shopping bag or having Arnold Schwarzenegger stick his head inside a crocodile, there is a sense of presence in his photographs that makes you feel like you’ve been invited somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.

Fittingly, his new exhibition at Athens’ Onassis Ready (open until December) is titled “you are invited” and features a body of work that spans from the present deep into the Teller lore. One of the oldest photographs in the exhibition is a picture of the photographer standing naked on his father’s grave. Fatherhood is a theme that echoes throughout the exhibition—which features portraits of Teller’s baby daughter re-enacting some of his famous photographs, as well as a re-enactment of a story his father-in-law once told. As Teller writes in the catalogue:

When doing military service, [Dovile’s father Mykolas] was an engineer helping to construct the power plant in Siberia. My interest curiously went:

“Oh wow, how was that?”

He replied, “I’ll tell you how it was.” He went to the fridge, took two glasses, and poured some vodka in them.

“It was minus 50 degrees” he said, “It was so cold, all pipes were frozen, no running water ...”

“Oh my god!” I stared at him with big eyes.

Then he said, “If you needed to go to the toilet, you needed a good friend and a stick.”

Mykolas got up in the kitchen, bent over, and gestured with his arms to chop off the shit. The shit, when it comes out, freezes immediately and needs to be hacked off.

Smiling, he stood there, handing over the glass of vodka and said, “That’s how it was in Siberia!”

Moved by this feat of male bonding, Teller and his creative partner Dovile Drizyte voyaged to the Arctic Circle with Alexander Skarsgård to relive this story. There in the tundra, the Golden Globe-winner used a stick to hack the frozen shit from Teller’s squatting behind. The resulting photograph is equal parts surreal, shocking, and tender—a quintessential entry into the Teller canon: a world-class aura farmer winning yet another blue ribbon at the state fair.

Thom Bettridge: What was it like having Alexander Skarsgård take the poop out of your ass?

Juergen Teller: We became friends after we met and I photographed him, and we kind of stayed in touch. We had numerous dinners together, and he’s really dear to Dovile and me. I had this idea for a long time, and I wanted to do something with this story my father-in-law told me when we first met in Lithuania. It took me a couple of years to realize how and what I’m going to want to do with it. I needed some Hollywood oomph to be the partner in crime with it, and to have a friend who is able to do it. I wanted to have some good-looking Hollywood star hack off my shit. When we told Alexander about the idea, he immediately was very enthusiastic about it—and he even suggested the location. We went near the Arctic Circle, and he had some friends there, very high up in Sweden. We went there and Dovile filmed it. It’s all about love. It’s a letter to my dead father, and to my father-in-law, and to male friendship.

What did you eat before?

I can’t remember.

Speaking of fatherhood, your “Iggy Does Teller” series is also featured in this exhibition, in which you restaged some of your most iconic photos with your daughter. How did that idea come to life?

Document magazine asked me to photograph Iggy Pop, and for some reason, I had never come across him, which was kind of surprising to me. We were really really impressed by him. When we became pregnant, and we didn’t know whether it was a boy or girl. We thought about names, and we thought, “Why don’t we call our baby Iggy?” Whether it’s a boy or girl, it would fit. The magazine heard that we called her Iggy, and they said, “Oh my God, we have to have her on the cover.” But you cannot just do a portfolio of all your baby pictures. I just thought, “I don’t want to do this. This is completely not right.” Because every parent has cute baby pictures, and everybody thinks they look so cute, but if anybody else looks it’s just another baby picture, right? And then we were sitting in the studio and we came up with this idea: What about if she re-enacts what other people perceive as my iconic photographs? It was tremendous fun.

I like the one based on Victoria Beckham in the Marc Jacobs bag, because kids are constantly climbing into bags like that. I like how it exposed the child-like nature of the original photo.

It was a fun exercise. And it made me realize something in general that is very important to me, which is that nobody else would be able to do it. It completely belongs to me.

How do you think about your body of work in general? Because you do sometimes refer to yourself, but it’s never with the same reverence some people have toward their archive.

I think about my work as a whole as a kind of journey. It starts with working over many years, producing and publishing a lot of different varieties of books and exhibitions. Two years ago, I had a very large show in Paris at the Grand Palais. So I didn’t want to just duplicate that show. I wanted to carry on producing a new body of work. And often the context in which something is shown makes it new and fresh for me. It very much depends on the time and the city, whether that’s influenced by political situations, I respond to it in a way that feels right at the moment.

I feel like a lot of societal ideas filter through your work, even when it’s not directly about them.

It’s all subjective to me—what I find interesting or important at the moment. It’s very important to me that I focus on the shift of life I had since I’ve been together with Dovile, and how my work has changed and my focus has changed since we’ve been working and living together and spending all our time together. She kind of re-energized me, and helped me focus on the positiveness of being alive.

There’s a recurring strand in your work, where you take full-body portraits of subjects in front of architecture. For example, the Barney’s catalogues you did in different cities, it’s this riff on the kinds of photographs people take on vacation, where someone is standing in front of something special to prove they were there. Does that come from a fascination with architecture for you? Or something else?

It isn’t just architecture. The series in the exhibition is one that I did for Italian Harper’s Bazaar where I photographed the whole issue. It’s a fashion story photographed in Italian churches—you know, all these places are so wonderful to look at. They’re so powerful, and you feel the weight of the strength, and you feel the architecture and how intelligent it is—how they let the light move into the building. You’ll find exquisite wood or marble works, or on one wall you’ll see a Caravaggio. And then there’s also modern churches, and ugly churches, and simple churches, and I was interested in that since after I got commissioned by the Vatican to photograph Pope Francis in a women’s prison, it brought me a lot closer to the idea of the church. But coming back to Dennis Freedman [former Creative Director of Barney’s] and doing these Barney’s things, it was a fabulous adventure to pick these cities. The only brief I had was to photograph the outfits from top-to-toe. The reason why we went to Albania was simply because my producer said, “Did you realize when you land in Albania, when you step out of the airport, there’s a hotel called Hotel Juergen. And I thought, “Oh, my God, we gotta have to go there. That is the angle of shooting the next Barney’s catalog.”

Those catalogues were a real blueprint for me when I started doing ad campaigns—because I feel like you never see advertising tell a real story like that.

We had a lot of fun.