Waiting Around Forever
Some more Juergen Teller
Juergen Teller, edited and designed by Cornel Windlin
Things happen in the world. You may have noticed. Pigeons, and other things, die — and their remains end up in bins or sitting out there in the street. Curious. And there are people who think they are fashion. Think the world revolves around them. And there’s a great conspiracy, a conspiracy as potent now as it was at the end of the last century, to pretend that it does.
When we think about the nineties, what do we think about? A world before the internet and the phone became ubiquitous? The last time you could actually disappear and be impossible to get or to grab if someone really wanted to annoy you and waste your time? The last gasp before social media, before constant ceaseless bickering about nothing. Before the online gambling and short-form video Armageddon that might succeed in killing humanity even in advance of a misaligned superintelligence receiving the fatal order to turn every last living organism on earth into paper clips?
A different time, certainly. But was it a better time?
In a way, it’s hard to tell from Juergen Teller’s pictures what he thought. A better or a worse time.
His style, even now, gets misunderstood. When, within the last few years, he took pictures of some people’s favourite celebrities — their emotional support rich and famous — in the way he always did, a fair number went mad. They said that his work was a conspiracy to make luminous and wonderful and simply ace guys and dolls look bad. To make them look like ordinary people. Natural lighting. Flat lighting. Making their clothes look as they might if you saw them on the street, and not primped and positioned to their best effect.
Must be a calculated effort on the part of the magazines and the picture editors. Must be some kind of massive conspiracy against a few particular famous faces.
What kind of sicko would do this? That’s what the fans asked. He could be no one normal; no one with a sense of awe that we all must have for the beautiful and well-known. No, Teller must be a bad photographer, an incompetent. Someone let in off the street and given a photographic kamikaze mission, a kind of fashion September 11. Destroy yourself, of course. But topple some titanic personalities in the process.
Naturally, all of this commentary was madness. The people who said it were unwell. They ought to be medically supervised for the rest of their lives. But they won’t be.
Did people react like this to what Teller did thirty years ago? To an extent, yes — they did.
I gather from the introduction to this volume — a three-headed conversation between Teller and Venetia Scott (an art director who is fabulously and winningly photographed in this very book) and Neville Wakefield — that when Teller himself first tried to take pictures and publish them, some people balked. He was not interested in clothes, you see. Not really.
And yet it was only the fashion magazines that commissioned his type of pictures: portraiture, shots of famous people for the sake of it.
This introductory interview elides much of the rest. How he got noticed. How he moved from Germany to London, where Teller says he fell into the hip crowds of the art magazines of the time. How he found someone like Scott (see above) to do the art design, to mastermind the style, to put everything intelligent into place.
In many ways, the pictures tell that story.
But I’ll get to that in a second.
First, I want to talk about Romania. I’ve been told a few stories myself about Romania just after the end of the Cold War. The ‘champagne’ was being sold for pennies, apparently; and you could drink as much as you wanted without the waiters telling you no. And the aircraft of the national flag-carrier were so rotten that it was a miracle your seat — unbolted from the surrounding cabin, naturally — didn’t slide around or smash through the floor upon landing. I’ve heard those sorts of stories.
What Teller found in Romania in the nineties was a little like that. Children smoking. People in heavy, ill-fitting clothes to guard against the cold. Young men with matinee idol moustaches from fifty years back. Hawks and snow and long utility poles serving confused functions. Dead animals in the street. Those things.
It’s after Romania that we get the celebrities. We get PJ Harvey looking very thin and beautiful and in danger. We see a lot of models of the era sat around waiting for the cameras to be set up, waiting to be dressed, looking very bored.
Annie Morton, Kate Moss, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love, Patti Smith.
Part of the goal here, surely, is not just realism but demystification. I could try, Teller implicitly says, to use the tools I have to hand to make this person look unreal — perhaps even afford them that stupidest of adjectives, ‘perfect.’ But I’d rather show you some of what I see when the lighting people are fixing their rigs. When the make-up is being done or touched up. When there’s a lot of waiting around.
Teller’s pictures are perhaps surprising — for works of this kind — in that they don’t have a lot of implied movement. Implicitly, someone’s going to move, of course. But there’s no tension in the frame. No grand sweeping arc of a hand or slash of a leg interrupted and caught.
Other pioneers of similarly rough, supposedly unguarded styles (Terry Richardson comes to mind, though his work always seemed much more contrived), imply a lot of movement in and around the frame, even if there is none.
Not so for Teller. There’s a lot of sitting and hunching. Some idle standing and leaning. A lot of loitering. These beautiful people. Apparently they’re invited to the big party — and you’re not on the list. They’re just waiting forever for it all to get started.