Juergen Teller’s GVM Music Playlist And His Unique Photography

A photography artist adored by the greatest museums and galleries as well as luxury brands, the German-born troublemaker has a cult for truth. His images never cheat. Often ironic, sometimes disturbing, always fascinating, they capture their subject “raw,” stripped-down body and soul. There’s no provocation in the original playlist he delivers, except for a small, avowed weakness for Plastic Bertrand.

18 essential, pleasantly surprising and cosmopolitan tracks that perfectly embody the eclecticism of the artist that is Juergen Teller . If his offbeat objective invites the world to observe itself from a new angle, the music that punctuates his life form a multi-vitamin playlist, to be listened to with serious nonchalance.

Clever Maestro

The dolce vita of Fred Buscaglione and his romance on the Italian Riviera, the liturgical elegance of Leonard Cohen, the guitar riffs of AC/DC, the emotional warmth of Nina Simone and her cover of the Beatles Here Comes The Sun, the virtuoso irreverence of Frank Zappa.

Juergen Teller ‘s symphonic essentials form a patchwork of influences, all recognized for their contagious dynamism. Charisma with The Notorious BIG, combined with the poetry of Iggy Pop’s wandering with The Passenger, or even the sensual provocative Peaches and her liberating anthems. Juergen Teller calls for a tangy listening session.

Laetitia Casta was one of the few “A-List” stars he hadn’t yet pinned to his list of conquests. This time, it’s done. And not just halfway. Somewhere between Little Edie in the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens and the Carol played by Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion , Casta lends herself to the consensual game of a borderline trip by giving the cue to rolls of paper towels or dirty dishes. A certain glamour.

So many of his photos are etched in our memory. Courtney Love holding Kurt Cobain’s head in a dressing room. Björk swimming with her son in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon. Idols Joan Didion in a Celine campaign or Maggie Smith in another for Loewe. Those hysterical series in which he and Charlotte Rampling pose in the nude, in the Louvre for her, legs spread on a piano for him, or even embracing in bed. Iggy Pop cuddling a tree. Kate Moss emerging from the sheets with pink hair. Or Victoria Beckham stepping out of a giant Marc Jacobs bag.

“I photograph people as I see them.”

He invented a photographic language: raw, dissident, ultra-realistic, anti-glamour, stripped of taboos, peppered with his personal life. A conversation with the German artist, to whom the Grand Palais Éphémère is offering an exhibition, I Need to Live , spanning thirty-five years of a constantly changing career.

His instantly recognizable visual universe has made him a star acclaimed by luxury brands, collectors, and celebrities, ready to do anything to satisfy his creative fantasies. A golden aura coupled with a reputation as a temperamental artist. We were afraid we were talking to a bear. Juergen Teller has revolutionized photography, fashion, and pop culture so much that we imagined him to be difficult. When the Zoom begins, he in London, we see a man in a pink sweatshirt, a few painted nails, of rare generosity. He resembles Puss in Boots, more than the ogre: cunning and kind.

To try to get into your career, I was looking for a starting point and I thought back to this record…

Juergen Teller: What is it about? You’re scaring me…

From the maxi Lollita , by the group AR Kane, for which you designed the cover in July 1987. The bust and face of a woman (on the back of the record, she hides a threatening knife), in a very sophisticated black and white, almost mannerist, very far from the raw, immediate style that would become your signature…

Wow! You have this record! It’s impossible to find. Can I take a picture of it? I’d like to show it to my wife. I think this is my first published photo, or at least my first record cover. I owe it to Vaughan Oliver, who was the artistic director of the 4AD label. I also did the cover of Blue Bell Knoll by the Cocteau Twins thanks to him: the close-up of a hand…

How did you end up in London photographing the indie scene at just 23?

I come from a small village a few kilometers from Nuremberg. My family made wooden parts for violins, from father to son. A very special wood, strong and elastic, imported from Brazil. But after a year working in the workshop with my father, I started having asthma attacks. I think today that it was completely psychosomatic… The very aggressive red dust that emanated from this wood made me physically ill. I was suffocating. I was sent to Italy to stay with a cousin to regain my strength. He took nature photos, with a tripod, he seemed to spend hours on it, it aroused my curiosity.

How old were you then?

18 years old. I know because it was the first time, looking through the eyepiece of his camera, that I had the impression of seeing. I emphasize this term: everything suddenly became visible. The next moment, I wanted to be a photographer. At 20, I joined the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie, the photography school in Munich. I stayed there from 1984 to 1986. At the same time, I had to do my military service, and to avoid cutting off the energy I was putting into wanting to become a photographer, I left for Berlin, because the specific passport then in West Berlin allowed me to go to England. I took my car and drove to London. I hardly spoke any English! But I was curious. I still am, I think. In London, I discovered that a very strong visual identity had developed around punk bands. A record cover could reflect all the strangeness of music, serve as a gateway to a world. I learned about the power of photography through covers. I started approaching labels, and the first to trust me was also the most demanding: it was Vaughan Oliver. Everyone was talking about his visuals at 4AD, for Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil or the Pixies. He also put me in touch with other art directors and one day, in the fall of 1989, I was commissioned to design the cover of a young Irish girl, Sinéad O’Connor. Her single was coming out in early 1990. It was Nothing Compares 2 U.

A tight portrait of her, very brown-red, where you captured something of her immense strength of assertion…

The album became the global hit it is today. And that cover catapulted my career. Orders came in from all over the world.

Including the fashion world?

Where I was born, fashion wasn’t even an option. But in London, these two worlds are intrinsically linked. A magazine like Zeitgeist suddenly asked me for 10- or 12-page portraits. You no longer just take a good photo; you start exploring strange ideas, and from there I started doing fashion spreads.

Did the fashion world impress you?

No, it’s strange, because I knew right away that it was easy for me to feel the meaning of the garment to work with. I like to have a conversation with the stylists, to extend their vision. The photo shouldn’t be cut off from this part of the design. To be free, the photo must make sense with the garment.

Even when you work, like you, with a keen sense of counterpoint?

Yes, we must always be aware of what the clothing means. Why we take a particular photo, in a particular way. Whether I’m developing a project with my mother, in the forest, or working with Saint Laurent and Anthony Vaccarello, my entire approach is motivated by the question: what can I do with a particular subject, what will my intervention be? By nature, I put as much pride in a commission as in personal work. I look for an idea while trying to ensure it is faithful to the meaning of the subject. The counterpoint is never posed as an argument – ​​ah, hey, I’m going to shock them a little! It doesn’t work like that.

You worked for a long time in close collaboration with Marc Jacobs…

Yes, this perfectly illustrates how an ad campaign, through its constraints, can lead to asking essential questions. With Marc, sometimes I proposed my ideas, sometimes they came from him. One day, he asked me if we could imagine the next campaign with Cindy Sherman as the model, whose work he collected. Great! Except that all the ideas I could come up with looked like parodies of Cindy Sherman photos. So the question becomes: what can I bring?

How did it end?

We looked at her characters – that didn’t work either. And finally, why not do a self-portrait with the one who taught us how to stage ourselves?

Let’s talk about this self-staging that runs through your work. Are you narcissistic?

Not at all. I’m mistreating myself. I’m naturally shy and relatively nervous, anxious when it comes to work. I wait for something to happen, I have my idea but I keep watching for the unexpected. I have to use psychology.

Psychiatrists talk among themselves about “waiting room diagnosis”: in the first second of their meeting with a patient, a detail strikes them, which they will dig into… Do you work on the detail?

A photographer works like an animal, sniffing out something tiny. We take pictures with our noses. The worst, for me, is when something is well prepared, with very good people, very aware of what they’re doing, but where all the magic is absent. Generally, in those moments, I suggest a coffee or a chat, small talk, because it’s in these moments of relaxation that the detail emerges. You have to be able to break your plans. A good photo isn’t enough for me.

Who owns an image: the photographer, the model? Or the brand?

It’s impossible to answer this question because it all depends on who asks it. Yet, it haunts me. Let’s just say that every good photo belongs to me! In the sense that it’s part of a journey.

The exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère is an opportunity to retrace this journey…

It is deeply personal, without being chronological. It is not a journey through a life but rather a journey of perpetual questioning. I wanted a strong title, one that hits the mark: I Need to Live . Because the layout of the exhibition will take you back to my starting point.

We come back to the impulse that leads to making images?

The first photo is a picture of me as a baby, taken by my father. When I discovered it, I was shocked: he had photographed me exactly like me, and in turn, I had photographed my own. His photo contains everything that makes up my so-called artist’s signature! Disturbing. I followed this first image with a photo I took from the local newspaper. It tells the story of my father’s suicide. A third photo is my mother’s head between the fangs of a crocodile. And the last photo is me, naked, on my father’s grave, with a beer, a cigarette, and a soccer ball. I Need to Live begins violently, to show that if I photograph again and again, it is to push back the gesture of despair that took hold of my father and that could take hold of me.

Nobuyoshi Araki describes your photography as “facing life.” What is more important to you: the moment or the photo?

The photo. The moment is part of the trust that will be placed in me for this photo.

When I asked you this, I was thinking of your master, William Eggleston, whom you photographed during endless nights, notably in Paris with Charlotte Rampling…

Oh yes, that evening with Bill lasted all night… It was when he had his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, more than fourteen years ago. One day, we were sitting on a bench near the Eiffel Tower and I saw a detail, I showed it to him, he stood up, silently stared at the detail and took a single photograph. I went after him, I took ten shots of the same subject. None as good as the single image captured by Eggleston. He never took a second image. I wish I could achieve that, but my method is the opposite: I take many images, I use the flash like a net to capture the model, so that the subject abandons himself, so that a dialogue can begin to exist between him and me.

Is photography a dialogue?

Necessarily. Otherwise, we’re in possession. Many people in fashion, in photography, in pop culture take themselves very seriously. To take a good photo, you have to drop that seriousness.

The times have become more considerate: is it still possible to shake up your subject, to provoke?

Today’s criteria, those of my students, are different. Is it still possible to do what I did with Vivienne Westwood? Would it make sense? I don’t ask myself the question in those terms. What is provocation? When I do a campaign with Joan Didion, I’m not trying to shake her up—I have too much respect for her—but to shake up a world that thinks that a great writer over 80 can’t be a pop icon.

Proof that yes!

The flash, the raw, naked light, it was a provocation—but against what was expected of a fashion image. I constantly question myself. What fascinates me today is the dialogue I can develop with my wife. Dovile has changed my photography enormously. With her, I have fun inventing, investing in places. I also work more in series.

For example ?

We were in Italy, at Lake Como, and I took a picture of my wife, legs raised on the bed, a posture to get pregnant better. The room had an incredible cachet. So we wanted to try each of the rooms. There were… 94! So we came back in the low season, we stayed a whole week, to cover all 94 rooms. The project is called The Myth, and we will show it in Paris for the first time.

Juergen Teller continues to hammer home the point that has made him unique in the landscape of contemporary photographers. He will be remembered as one of those who tore down the wall that usually separated personal work from campaigns for fashion houses. In every case, his photographs exude an incredible sense of intimacy that transcends genres. For him, Kim Kardashian doesn’t hesitate to stretch her rump toward the lens, Catherine Deneuve dons rubber boots, and Yves Saint Laurent widens his frankly creepy eyes.

His nonchalant motto has always been “I photograph people as I see them.” It must be said that he himself makes you want to get comfortable when you see him appear with bare legs, in short fuchsia pink nylon shorts, summer and winter, in homage to his favorite football club, Bayern Munich – he who has lived in London since he was 22. 

Juergen Teller has been paving his way in this way for forty years. What other contemporary artist can boast of having photographed the Pope and having had a retrospective (with the obvious title, I need to live ) at the Grand Palais?

Juergen Teller, I Need to Live, exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris 7th, from December 16, 2023 to January 9, 2024 was a total success.