Masters and Margaritas

And foxes, in Juergen Teller’s world

The Master IV by Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller’s book, part of a longer photographic series, is based on a couple of premises. One is that he is depicting people who are masters of their own arts. Great photographers, famous actresses and models, painters and artists in other ways. And also that he is depicting them in his own way: a way that is occasionally, when his pictures travel widely on social media, misunderstood. In theory, at least, Teller’s work has little artifice. He’s not, or so he says, trying to make his subjects look good. They are not aided by a lot of phoney lighting. It looks like natural light. No studio make-up. No help, not rescue from reality.

And everything is overt. It’s not effortless — the con of more glam photography. It does not make gods of men. Instead, Teller’s pictures, although they are fascinating and in their own way artificial, seem ordinary. Even their subjects — famous faces — pedestrian.

This book contains shots of the great photographers Araki of Japan, Boris Mikhailov of Ukraine and William Eggleston of the United States. And the famous actress Charlotte Rampling. But if you didn’t know that, so falsely natural these images are, you might think of them as depicting just anybody.

In that spirit, I would like to discuss the pictures primarily as images, with little reference to who is shown in them.

An older woman stands at a slightly bent posture in a garden filled with gravelled paths. Most of the frame is a tangle of dark and muddy green. A shrub which from one angle may even look ornamental is tangled and syncopated.

The next shot is a close up of a maturer man, the light on his face, which we don’t much see. He’s sat on a municipal bench, holding a well-used camera; behind him, a white polyurethane bin bag hangs off a ring and blows towards the viewer.

There is no glamour here.

Next, vodka being poured into a series of cut-glasses. They’re seemingly heavy, ornamental, a little out of style. Cut off by the frame, to their left, a plate of slices of thin bread sit, with what looks like salmon roe atop.

There is going to be a party.

The next shot is of that party. But not really. On a glass-topped coffee table we have cups and saucers, a little charcuterie, a pack of cigarettes with a stark German warning. Smoking is ‘tödlich,’ we are told. Through the glass of the table, we see big photo-books piled.

I Am Not I, one of the books is called. The words are almost ambigrammatic, almost palindromes, typographically. The next shot, we have an older man, his hair thinning, his face smiling beatifically. He’s sitting before a blown-up picture of a very slender male torso, but his head is wreathed in the leaf arrays of a dark green houseplant.

Now the older woman is looking about in the garden. The photographer has changed his angle. The shrubbery is a little more geometric. It makes more sense. She’s peering into it. And now we know who she’s looking for. A pretty fox cub, fur shining and elegant, is crouching among the greenery. No wonder foxes are agile and hunters. This one’s pursued by a camera, is caught in a frame, and is still obscured and hard to grasp.

And now, a hard cut. We’re in quite another part of the world. A elderly Japanese man is standing, his receding hair wild and his face pulled into a comical confused expression. He’s wearing a t-shirt whose design we cannot see and red braces. His glasses have one blacked-out lens. And he’s holding two plates with pictures on them. One shows two men kissing: the older Japanese man, him, and another — a blond man.

And now we are back, back in the suburban garden. The older woman’s head, the back of it, is in the foreground, but it is the fox cub’s face that is in focus. Shrouded still by leaves, we can see its keen eye in profile; its mouth open. We see slightly protruding tongue. Some teeth exposed as if the animal were laughing. And now another shot, a picture front-on. We see the fox’s beautiful eyes. We see its proud face.

Another hard cut. The Japanese man is being pictured from overhead. All we see are his red braces and the immense patch of baldness on the crowd of his head. He’s holding open a book to show one of his photographs. It rests underneath his baggy hand.

One more cut now and the older woman has disappeared into the shrubbery, perhaps in lunging for the fox. She’s almost surrounded, hardly mistakable. Like a toddler too enthusiastically learning to walk and disappearing into a flower bed.

The older white man is sprawled on a sofa, camera in his hand. Another man looks at a pink gorilla, some kind of advert. Behind him, a sign that is not lit says ‘open’ beneath a poster announcing ‘the right to bear arms.’

Now the fox is nosing away at something, back in the suburban garden. Big windows or french doors look out onto it. The older woman, in the other side of the frame, looks on interestedly. Many pages later, she holds the fox in her arms, sat on a folding chair. It looks straight ahead at the camera. It has posed before.