26 posts tagged "Juergen Teller"
Tell Tales: In Conversation With Juergen Teller
Juergen Teller, fashion photographer, requires no introduction. But there are less familiar Tellers. Juergen Teller, son. Juergen Teller, forest wanderer. Juergen Teller, escapee from the violin-making industry. Tonight, as he opens his small show, Irene im Wald, at The Journal Gallery in Williamsburg, Teller shines a bit of light on these hidden facets of himself. Commissioned as a supplement to the next issue of The Journal magazine, Irene im Wald has evolved into the first part of what Teller sees as a four-part series to be shot in the woods near the house in Erlangen, Germany, where he was raised. This first installment features photographs of Teller’s mother, Irene, and written reminiscences that caption some of the shots. The mood is meditative and a far cry from the arresting Marc Jacobs campaign images for which Teller is best known.
Both Teller and The Journal have bigger, showier openings ahead: Next month, The Journal will launch its new 35,000-square-foot space in Williamsburg with a show by Daniel Turner; Teller, for his part, opens his Francesco Bonami-curated show The Girl With the Broken Nose at the Palazzo Reale in Milan on September 20. In the meantime, Teller talks to Style.com about sonhood, fatherhood, One Direction, and his lack of anxiety of influence.
I suspect that for a lot of people who know your fashion photography, this show will come as something of a surprise. But do you see Irene im Wald as being of a piece with the rest of your work?
What I do for fashion and what I shoot for myself, I treat it differently, and I also treat it the same. If I’m shooting a campaign, I have to photograph clothes, I have to photograph shoes, handbags, and spectacles. There are commercial needs. I find it difficult to do, honestly, the pre-production. But I think I’m good at it, the fashion stuff. And once I’m shooting, then I’m just shooting. And for me taking a picture is always about a relationship; it’s intimate. So these pictures, they are intimate, too, but in a different way.
What inspired you to shoot your mom in the forest?
I was always drawn toward this forest—I played there as a child. And I’ve always had this urge to do pictures there. But when I tried, it never worked. I was trying too hard, I think. Then I moved to my house in Suffolk, in the country, and there I began to try taking landscape pictures again. And it was better, and that gave me the courage to go back to my mum’s place and take pictures there. So I went, and when I went, well, my mum was quite keen to go out walking with me, and so we were out walking and talking and that’s what happened.
The anecdotes that run with some of the photos—are those the things you were talking about? I mean, those are rather intense memories, like almost having the money your mother sent you in London stolen, when you were young and broke.
No, no. The things my mum and I talked about, they were banal. Like we were talking about my children. Normal things like that. But then when I came home to England and looked at the photos, these other stories came back to me. It’s all a love letter to my mother. She’s getting older. Continue Reading “Tell Tales: In Conversation With Juergen Teller” »
A First Look At Industrie‘s Yearbook Issue
With its intense insider focus, Industrie magazine always acts as a kind of fashion yearbook. The latest issue, out Wednesday, takes the concept literally. For a feature titled Class of 2012, the editors enticed some of fashion’s biggest names to rifle through their high school photo albums. You’ll likely recognize the floppy-haired fellow in the striped shirt, but who’s the future street-style star in the plain white Lacoste? Here’s your exclusive first look at the new issue, featuring Haider Ackermann on the cover (pictured, above), shot by Juergen Teller.
Garage Time
When Dasha Zhukova released her debut issue of Garage magazine during fashion week last September, The New York Times called it “one of the most intriguing magazines to come along in years.” To jog your memory, recall that cover (there were three different ones) lensed by Hedi Slimane, featuring the lower half of a nude model with a peel-off Damien Hirst sticker on her crotch. One year later, she’s got issue number three ready to hit newsstands September 10. The theme, it would appear, is a little less provocative: time.
“Our themes in the past were not risqué just for the sake of it—it was more that we focused on subject matter that we thought resonated,” she tells Style.com. “We decided to focus on ‘time’ as our theme as it seems to be the one thing that everyone is either trying to buy more of or rush their way through with the increasing presence of technology in our everyday lives. From our obsession with defying the effects of aging to the stress of deadlines that loom in our careers to things as seemingly trivial as arriving ‘fashionably late,’ time touches all aspects of our lives.”
Zhukova brought on the likes of photographers Nick Knight and Juergen Teller to interpret time for the five different covers, all linked to an editorial inside the issue. Knight did a Lichtenstein-inspired shoot with Lindsey Wixson, with text captions by Perez Hilton. “Nick Knight’s shoot and collaboration with Perez takes traditional pop art to the contemporary extreme. It takes an aesthetic that feels almost classical to today’s generation and frames it timelessly with the use of today’s digital shorthand,” she explains. Teller, for his part, photographed the oldest tree in the world with Spanish actress Rossy de Palma as his model. The other three covers include works by artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, John Currin, and a limited-edition vinyl record with a conversation between Marc Jacobs and Currin. Here, Style.com has an exclusive first look at the Knight (pictured, above) and the Teller (pictured, below) covers.
Breaking Down the Fall Campaigns
The Fall ’12 campaigns started trickling in with magazines’ July issues, and there has been a spate of new ads in the recent August glossies. From a model’s standpoint, landing a campaign is the holy grail in terms of both money and prestige. The reason girls walk in runway shows to begin with (catwalk turns are notoriously underpaid or paid in trade) is to get noticed by the designers, stylists, and photographers who could potentially turn them into a billboard or the face on the side of a bus. Aside from Kate Moss (pictured, above), who appears in the latest from Salvatore Ferragamo (lensed by Mikael Jansson), and Daria Werbowy‘s reprisal at Céline (Juergen Teller previously shot her for Spring ’11), this season has really been about fueling up-and-comers. Case in point: Elza Luijendijk, whose Prada runway exclusive eventually turned into a spot in the coveted campaign shot by Steven Meisel. The 16-year-old Dutch beauty also wowed in Versace’s Fall gothic-chic series with the help of Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott (pictured, below). Kati Nescher has been a huge success story this year, and she scooped up contracts with Chanel and Nina Ricci (and we’re guessing more are on the way in the not-so-distant future).Overall, the general trend in fresh faces is: The newer they are, the more designers pack in together. Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, and Etro have all put out multi-girl images. The Balenciaga pack is completely unknown: Julier Bugge, Linn Arvidsson, Juliet Ingleby, Anniek Kortleve, and Sophie Hirschfelder—even the most diligent model watchers have no idea who these girls are, but Nicolas Ghesquière always loves to throw us a few head-scratchers. On the other hand, Dolce & Gabbana perfectly cast the more recognizable Italian trifecta of Bianca Balti, Bianca Brandolini d’Adda, and Monica Belluci for its Fall ads.
Some Enchanted Eveningwear:
Magic, Models, And More At Stella McCartney’s London Presentation
“I wanted to show English humor and irreverence,” said Stella McCartney, so demure that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, even though, minutes before, she’d proved that unleashing mass hysteria in an audience is a talent that clearly runs in the family. To launch her exclusive London Evening collection for Fall 2012 (slideshow here), McCartney threw a black-tie bash at One Mayfair, a soaring neoclassical space that used to be the church where Led Zeppelin played its first London gig in 1968. At the beginning of the evening, when show producer Sam Gainsbury cryptically promised “something big,” there was a millisecond or so when I imagined a Led Zep reformation. One could but dream. Father Paul in a reprise of his Grammy performance? That, at least, would be easier to swing.
The crowd—including Rihanna, Kate Moss and Jamie Hince, Mario Testino, Juergen Teller, the Le Bons, the Driver sisters, Stella Tennant, Bianca Jagger, and belle of the ball, Shailene Woodley—was well seeded with models in Stella dresses. Not, they insisted, the clothes we had come to see. “We’re just guests,” said Kinga Rajzak, dazzling in a black sheath with a white contoured effect. She was one of the new guard of girls on hand. Shalom Harlow, Amber Valletta, Yasmin Le Bon, and Anouck Lepère were also wearing Stella gowns, ranging from variants on the contouring to marble-printed bubble dresses to confections spun from vibrant orange or electric blue lace. Lucie de la Falaise brought daughter Ella on her first big fashion night out. Appropriate, then, that they’d be staying over at godmother Moss’ London pad.
After guests chomped through a veg feast of five small but perfectly formed courses, Dutch illusionist Hans Klok, World’s Fastest Magician, took to the stage. He laid a hypnotized Alexa Chung across three huge scimitars and left her essentially floating in mid-air, balanced on the sword on which her head rested. Trance state or not, she claimed she could still feel the point of the blade an hour later. Childlike glee is always my default position with magic tricks, but surely this was not the “something big.” Suddenly, there was an almighty shriek from a nearby table, where it seemed like a scrap had broken out between a guest and a waiter. Then Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” came walloping over the sound system, and all hell broke loose. Models, waiters, and Shailene Woodley flew hither and yon in a breathtakingly tight dance routine choreographed (in 24 hours, apparently) by Blanca Li, a fierce-looking but funny Spanish woman who was sitting at my table quietly chatting with Pedro Almodóvar’s costume designer Paco Delgado one minute and whirling through space like a dervish the next. But in amidst the physical frenzy, there was the elegantly precarious image of Shalom, Amber, and Yasmin parading around the room on catwalks improvised from chairs placed under each foot as they took a step.
“Something big” it was, indeed. And thrilling and surprising. Even Simon Le Bon had no idea what his wife was about to do. It was all a remarkable testament to timing, pluck—and the remarkably pliable properties of Stella’s eveningwear.
CLICK HERE for the complete Fall ’12 eveningwear collection, plus pictures from the party and performance >