Juergen Teller №2

juergenteller.tumblr.com

Check out my previous Juergen Teller post here for more images.

Walter Pfeiffer

You see what I show you. Walter Pfeiffer is a high fashion photographer to the average person. Now you also know that he has homoerotic tendencies toward young males in much of his photography. Once you know this about Pfeiffer, some of his fashion ads make more sense. I'm not a huge fan of commercial or fashion photography, as you may have noticed, but Pfeiffer has this dual personality about his photography that cannot be dismissed. Just like Terry Richardson's racy, yet sexually and aesthetically appealing ads. Or Juergen Teller's simple, yet gloriously powerful ads against plain white backgrounds. 

Interview Magazine, and Vogue France, homotography.blogspot.com & www.imagebam.com

Michael Schmelling

I've been browsing through the book SHOOT- Photography of the Moment recently, and came across an interesting antidote of the different connections between photographers (and all artist associations for that matter.. ). In an essay by Ken Miller called the moment, Miller states that Michael Schmelling engages with the mysterious intensity of 'wrong' photographs, while maintaining forerunner's Wolfgang Tillmans and Juergen Teller's formalist approach to consumer photography (who wouldn't want to associate themselves with them though??). By exhibiting the 'wrong' photos, Schmelling celebrates the photographs that a vast majority of photographers would have discarded. Miller argues that the trend away from choosing a photograph with the 'correct' aesthetics, is the photography of the moment. It's the photography of today. It's the photography of that particular moment captured in time and unaltered by technology. The photographs with blurred focus, shifting light, or subject issues are celebrated in Schmelling's work. 

Speaking of artist associations, the image below is of Montreal's band Wolf Parade. Pop cultural associations.. 

Images from michaelschmelling.com.

Wolfgang Tillmans

After endless days of browsing hundreds of Wolfgang Tillmans' photographs, I narrowed his diverse collection of work down to four images. This post will likely be altered many times before I am satisfied. Tillmans' work is most powerful and affecting in exhibition and book form; therefore, out of context, his photographs seem to have a discontinuity as a whole collection. However, in installation form, Tillmans "has used not only the content but also the traditions of arranging vernacular photography to assert informal imagery as art (Penny Martin, Shoot- Photography of the Moment by Ken Miller)."

Wolfgang Tillman's installation archive is the perfect example of how different a photograph can look hung up against the white walls of a gallery. I love the white cleanliness of contemporary galleries. It's like fresh laundry.
Checkout Tillman's newest collections and website @ www.tillmans.co.uk.
Images from Christie's Art Auction, Artnet, Andrea Rosen Gallery, and Dateline Jewish Art Museum Online

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

www.katybaggott.com & www.lehmannmaupin.com.