A few years ago, I worked at a style magazine that was running a cover story featuring Kanye West, with pictures shot by Juergen Teller, one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. In one image, West could be seen standing in front of a white backdrop, presumably in a photo studio. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots—his only adornment a thin gold chain—and his arms were thrown limply to his sides. With his eyes closed and his upturned features lit by the harsh glare of a flash, he looked genuinely drained, but also, somehow, glamorous, in his indifferent surrender to the viewer’s gaze. On the night of the issue’s close, as I was printing out the story in order to proofread it, I looked down and realized that I was wearing the same outfit as West: a black T-shirt, jeans, and a thin gold chain. Spreading my arms and throwing my head back against the copy room’s white wall, I asked my co-worker Shawn to take my picture. It was three in the morning—the magazine’s issue closes tended to run punishingly late—and in the photo, which Shawn took with his iPhone, I was captured as I stood, exhausted, next to the Xerox machine, in the sharp neon glare of a midtown office. This was no posh photo studio in London, and I was certainly no Kanye. Still, when the two photos were placed side by side, their aesthetic was not so different.
I was reminded of that night last week, after the publication of W magazine’s “Best Performances” issue, which was shot by Teller. This iteration of the annual photographic roundup—which the German-born, London-based Teller has shot several times before—featured established movie and television stars as well as up-and-comers, among them Jared Leto, Tessa Thompson, Taylour Paige, Riz Ahmed, and LaKeith Stanfield. The photos, which were largely shot on what appears to be a single street in West Hollywood, showcase the actors as they pose casually in natural lighting against a grimy urban backdrop of asphalt and dirt, dusty parked cars and tired succulents, fallen leaves and gnarly-rooted trees. The subjects are wearing designer outfits (the shoot was styled by W’s editor-in-chief, Sara Moonves), but this doesn’t detract from the pictures’ off-the-cuff, improvised look, as if the stars had been left stranded on a street corner.
The responses to the shoot, both outraged and amused, arrived almost immediately. The L.A. Times called the pictures “ridiculous,” Vulture dubbed them “shockingly mundane,” and Artnet referred to them as “weirdo photos”; many people on social media, too, came up with dozens of quick memes, with most focussing on the pictures’ slapdash, snapshot-like quality. Familiar photos were pulled out for the purpose of comical comparison and posted on Twitter, accompanied by some variation of the words “shot by Juergen Teller for W” as punch line: Ben Affleck caught by paparazzi while struggling to carry multiple items from Dunkin’ Donuts; Shaquille O’Neal standing on a sidewalk behind a slender tree; Robert Pattinson in a dun-colored Adidas tracksuit jacket, appearing dazed in a claustrophobic-looking kitchen. Riz Ahmed, one of the actors featured in the W issue, who posed for Teller while sitting on what looked like an IKEA folding chair, tweeted that “this @wmag shoot was the fastest of my life. 20 seconds, two clicks. Juergen Teller is the OG.” Though he no doubt meant the words admiringly, Ahmed’s Twitter mentions were soon teeming with responses suggesting Teller’s audacious amateurism. (“20 seconds, two clicks. I am the OG,” wrote one user, sharing two blurry snapshots of a meandering Chihuahua.) People, in other words, were upset that they could have taken the same pictures with their phones, if not at 3 A.M. in a neon-lit midtown office copy room, then in the grubby sunlight of an L.A. street.
I first encountered Teller’s photos as a teen-ager in the nineties, while reading British youth-culture magazines like The Face and i-D, and what distinguished his images in those publications has remained consistent in the years since, even as his commercial and artistic success has skyrocketed. (In the past three decades, he has shot major campaigns for Celine, Louis Vuitton, and Marc Jacobs, among other luxury brands, and contributed to a wide array of fashion and art magazines; his work is also shown internationally in prestigious galleries and museums.) Teller’s pictures have always had a seductiveness that emerges not in spite of but because of their playful, slightly off immediacy. The images have a glamour that relies on a certain level of deglamorization: whether shooting his own nakedness, but for a pair of tiny running shorts, for an Asics shoes campaign, or presenting the usually circumspect-to-a-fault Victoria Beckham with her legs dangling comically out of an enormous shopping bag for a Marc Jacobs campaign, Teller stylizes the human element without abandoning its rawness. As the photographer rose to prominence, his aesthetic was quite different from, say, the high-touch maximalism of David LaChapelle, or the sumptuous, all-American perfection of Steven Meisel. These were fashion photographers who, in different ways, prized the glossy and the theatrical, while Teller preferred to give us a peek behind the scenes. (“I just turn the page,” Teller told New York magazine, in 2008, of more traditional fashion photography. “It doesn’t really interest me very much. My work has nothing to do with that.”)
While some of the discourse surrounding Teller’s W portfolio isn’t so surprising—this might not be the optimal cultural moment for elevating the work of a white male superstar photographer—I’ve been struck by the underlying critique, present in many of the social-media posts, that, in its blasé approach, Teller’s work is insulting not only to the very art of photography but to his subjects, as well. Several critics have seized on the photo of Tessa Thompson, in particular, claiming that Teller “did her dirty.” (This recalled the critique recently aimed at Tyler Mitchell’s Vogue cover of Kamala Harris, which argued that the palpably casual photograph of the Vice-President was diminishing to her not just as a woman but as a woman of color.) The photo of Steven Yeun in front of a pickup truck, slouching on the same folding chair used in Riz Ahmed’s shoot, has similarly been characterized as disrespectful. One could argue, however, that Teller’s photos are disrespectful to the very notion of stardom. Those who are inclined to see his images as an example of white-male privilege might consider his W photograph of George Clooney, clownishly sporting children’s bicycles for hands, or of Jared Leto, standing in front of a tree with his hands in his pockets, looking far more quotidian than we’ve seen him look in years, as part of the same commentary: Is stardom, in general, not the ultimate form of privilege?
In the nineties, up-and-coming models would appear daily at the door of Teller’s London studio, seeking work. He began taking photos of them, which he later compiled in “Go-Sees,” his 1999 book, which has become a cult coffee-table classic. Fresh-faced and scruffily dressed, these skinny young beauties—some, like Gisele Bündchen, would later go on to be superstars, while others disappeared into obscurity—were sidewalk subjects whose shooting allowed for a quick and improvisatory chipping away at the rigid scaffolding of the fashion and entertainment world. With his W portfolio, Teller brings the sidewalk subject to the fore, once again: Jacob Elordi squatting in the dirt, a lone, empty Solo cup lolling under a car to his left; Maria Bakalova propping up her Saint Laurent spike heels against the back of a rusty maroon Toyota minivan; Nicole Beharie crouching in a pink-and-turquoise shopping cart; Rachel Brosnahan striking a dramatic pose, taken in Irving Penn-like profile, while balancing precariously on the edge of the road. The lighting is grainy, and the subjects unretouched—their skin often shiny or slightly pitted—and yet this is what makes the pictures work. The actors look real, and they are still attractive. More attractive, even. These weren’t the kind of photos that you’d post on Instagram; they were the kind of pictures that a friend might take of you, upload to their story, and then tag you in. As I clicked through the images, I marvelled at Teller’s coherent vision. For the past thirty years, he has taught us that being just a little bit ugly is cool.
