Juergen Teller.

“Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy,” Teller says, “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.” Juergen Teller is one of the most influential fashion photographers today. He was born in Germany in 1964, studied photography at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photograhie in Munich, and is now based in London. In an interview between Teller and New York Times journalist, Cathy Horyn, he stated that he's photographed Marc Jacobs' advertisments for eleven years, did not get paid in the beginning, uses a 35mm camera and refuses to go digital. Most of his shoots for Marc Jacobs, Missioni, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood, Louis Vuitton, and so many more designers, were done by himself, with the help of his one assistant.

Juergen Teller uses a raw flash and leaves the original soft and muted colours from the 35mm film. Most fashion photographers do the opposite, by over saturating the colours afterward and bleeding the images off the edge of each page. My favourite thing about Teller is that he never retouches the images. Anyone can be a photographer these days with photoshop. “I’m interested in the person I photograph,” he says. “The world is so beautiful as it is, there’s so much going on which is sort of interesting. It’s just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It’s just pointless to me.”Teller's subjects are almost completely surrounded by white space, and he's known to leave blank pages in a shoot. There is a raw harshness to his photographs. Although his subjects are undeniably sexy, they can be slightly repulsive. Often Teller's models are distant tiny figures, which ironically makes the fashion redundant.

Images from Artnet, W Magazine Dominica photoshoot, Horses think blog, TrendLand & juergenteller.tumblr

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