Juergen Teller likes to merge his professional lives and his domestic/private ones, deconstructing the idealised bodies normally depicted in high-class fashion magazines by revelling in awkward and ungainly positions, blotchy skin, sagging waistlines, and humorous, spontaneous, and inebriated scenarios. He tends to avoid elegance or perfection, embracing the casual, uninhibited, ridiculously silly, and aesthetically disastrous.
Teller oscillates between the super-serious and the super-flippant, being very aware of how his images are read. This lack of conventional protocols and good taste, so that glamour is often methodically avoided, includes himself as an unclothed flabby subject, as well the models who are friends and who trust him. Some like Charlotte Rampling and Vivienne Westwood take on long-term collaborations, even when they were naked and in their 60s.
When speaking of his own nudity in The Guardian, Teller has said: ‘For me, being German, naked is a natural way to be. When I started my self-portraits, I didn’t want to be associated with any statement of dress. That’s how you’re born, that’s how you do it. I like the shapes and the colour of flesh.’
Examples of such Teller artworks include Charlotte in Goal, London (2003); Kristen McMenamy Casa Mollino No.2, Turin (2011); Siren Studios in Los Angeles (2012); Mother with Crocodile, Bubenreuth, Germany (2002); Vivienne Westwood (2009); Vater und Sohn, Bubenreuth, Germany (2005).
