Ahead of his monumental exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris, Juergen Teller sits down with fellow artist Anne Imhof to discuss his photography practice and his life’s work.
In a warped world that increasingly operates in a distorted simulation of fillers, Facetune and carefully filtered personal branding, thank God for Juergen Teller. The renowned photographer and artist has made it his life’s work to candidly capture humanity in all its tragicomic glory, often inserting himself in his starkly lit images with triumphant anti-vanity, humour and honesty. Tender and brutal coexist in Teller’s pictures, something which his upcoming exhibition at the Grand Palais Éphémère puts front and centre. Titled Juergen Teller – i need to live, it gives a blow-by-blow of the photographer’s life without pulling any punches, taking the viewer through the transformative events that have shaped his life and work with new and existing pieces of photography, video and installations. Death and birth run parallel in the exhibition – his biggest to date – that ultimately encourages you to choose life, nurtured in great part by Teller’s profound relationship with his wife and partner in art, Dovile Drizyte. In the lead-up to the opening, Juergen Teller asked his close friend, artist Anne Imhof, to join him for a conversation about his thoughts behind the show and its defiant title. Here is the transcript of their exchange.
Anne Imhof: Hi! I see you guys!
Juergen Teller: We can’t see you. Oh, we see you!
Dovile Drizyte : You are in classic black! Oh my gosh, you dressed up for this!
JT: Totally!
AI: I should have dressed up for you! I wanted to welcome you better Juergen. I know that you get kind of nervous if it’s too cool. How are you?
DD : Crazy!
JT: We are good. We had a bit of flu, kind of a cold hanging over, eve- rybody in Europe has it.
AI: Oh, it’s good that I’m not in Europe right now.
JT: When did you escape?
AI: I came here about a week ago.
DD: I just want to say that we are recording this. It goes straight to Jo Barker’s archive!
AI: Okay, to make this official, I am here in Los Angeles, Juergen is in
London, it’s 12.47PM Pacific Standard Time in my home and it’s 8.47PM Greenwich Mean Time. We are having a conversation over Zoom for Re-Edition’s December issue and Juergen has a major retrospective of his work at the Grand Palais, opening to the public on December 16th. So that’s why we are talking.
JT: That’s right. I thought that was a good idea, to ask you. AI: Yeah, I was happy.
JT: Good.
AI: I always get a bit nervous when things are recorded and then they go somewhere... I’ve known you for a while and consider you as a friend and it’s something to do with a friend, it’s different. I thought about how to start with that and when I was writing to you over SMS about what you wanted to talk about you wrote back, ‘The feeling of being content’. And I was like, wow. I felt there’s a need for something in that and I saw that also in your title of the show, i need to live, so I wanted to start basically with how we met each other. It was interesting the way you came into my life, and you re-entered always at points that were super important for me. We met in 2012 I think and I had just graduated and you were doing Zeit magazine about Frankfurt and I remember that we were meeting at Pik Dame. You were sitting there with your people, your assistants and stuff, and you were sitting under this fake Jenny Saville, like a big woman, in a red velvet room. It was a place I was going in and out of because I was living there and where we hung out all the time, and then I saw you there and while we were going through the streets of the red light district of Frankfurt to my studio you were taking photographs of everything, and also in the bar. And I was like, ‘Wow, he finds it inter- esting, the things I see every day’. You were taking everything in and I was like, ‘Wow, how much can he take in and hold’. We were going to my studio and I remember I was kind of nervous and curious about you and what would happen and you started taking those couple of pictures of me and I felt like super safe in this moment. I hadn’t experienced something like this before and it was so different than I expected. I felt from you that there was love in the room. I thought, he loves women. Like, me, a bit. There was a really beautiful thing happening for me.
![Juergen Teller- Father and Son, Bubenreuth, 2003](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663cce37b58d285bc657562b_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-1.webp)
JT: And we did some pictures in this café. Plank or something?
AI: Yes, Plank, on the street of this crossing. I lived right above that.
JT: Yeah, I really enjoyed the whole thing and I really enjoyed meeting you. It just felt good and it felt right, you know.
AI: I also remember we met one time in Paris and there was a shoot coming up of Comme des Garçons that didn’t happen in the end but you wanted to get me in, photograph me, because it was about punk, and I remember that I was like, ‘Oh, Juergen thinks I’m a punk, okay, that’s kind of cool’. (laughs)
JT: Yeah, that was a time when you were first coming to Paris a little bit and going to maybe have a place there.
I looked through this camera, this square thing, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, for the first time in my life, I see something’ - Juergen Teller
AI: Exactly, I had this grant there. I had a studio there for a year or something. But I was thinking about how it felt there was a need of yours to take the world in somehow. It’s a question that’s pretty simple but when did you feel that the first time, wanting to become an artist?
JT: I don’t know about an artist but I felt – you know, I used to be a bowmaker for violins because my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, they were doing bridges for the double bass and cellos and violins. It’s a small village which is now the Czech Republic, so it’s Sudetenland, and after the war they had to move and in the vil- lage that’s what they do, they do guitars, violins, parts for instruments. And then I wanted to be a bowmaker, anyway, cut the story short, I did that for a year, it was so much hard work and I had sort of psycho- somatic reactions to the wood dust and had super heavy asthma. It came up after one year during an apprenticeship of three years and I couldn’t breathe anymore. The doctor sent me to get a change of air and I went to Tuscany on a holiday and my cousin had a camera and I looked through this camera, this square thing, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, for the first time in my life, I see something’. Like the first time you are aware of music or the first time you eat sushi or something, some sensation. Before you walk around in the world as a teenager or as a young man and you don’t see anything. But this square thing made me super curious about the world and I think that’s when it really started. And then within my own work, or within this assignment, or when we met in Frankfurt, then I get really super hyper concentrated on what’s around me. It could be this beautiful kebab, or this person or that person. And then I get really super awake. When I go on holiday with Dovile, then it’s just a holiday. We take care of each other and the kid and that’s not necessarily work. You read a book and you relax and da-da-da, but then of course when I do have an idea for a project, then it starts again – phases where you are super concentrated. I believe I’m a curious, naïve person in a way who jumps into the cold water to do things, you know? Like an adventurous little boy who does things. Which I find exciting.
AI: Whenever I had the chance to see you in those moments of work or moments where you are in this state I had the feeling you see eve- rything... It’s very democratic, you don’t make any distinctions between what’s important or what’s good and what’s not good and I felt this also very much when you did the portraits of me. I had the feeling there isn’t one moment that is worse than the other, also in terms of the objects and the people in the world. But how do you make choices? Both in the moment, about what to shoot or not to shoot, and then in the editing process, afterwards?
JT: Now in a way when I’m older and I know what I’m doing and I’m more secure and everything, I know pretty much what I want and I know when it’s good. I’m not swimming around. Like, for example, we do a portrait and I’m very open in the scenario with a person, everything is nearly there, everything is really good but for some stupid reason that I can’t quite figure out it doesn’t quite click but I keep doing it to loosen up that moment with that person and myself and I’m also quite open to saying, ‘Ah, it doesn’t quite work and I don’t quite know why’. And then maybe we get a coffee or we do something else, and then something happens. And then I’m like a wild animal in a bush and go ‘Ahhh, that’s it, stay like this, do this, now we have it’, and I fucking nail it.
AI: I always found it very admirable when I worked with you and we talked about the process of your work that it has to do with intuition a lot, and also this intuition that can be very directed but you leave the things very open. You don’t walk in with a concept. I didn’t feel like I was in a plan. It was a situation that was open, like me when I work, doing things out of your intuitive, artistic inner feeling. I had the feeling it was going step by step. Everything is open and also kind of exciting but it’s also fucking threatening.
JT: Oh, scary – scary for me. It’s nerve-racking. So often I’m nervous and I also rely on the subject, I rely on the person and what kind of conversa- tion we have and where it’s going, to the left or to the right. And then the weather comes into play, certain scenarios come into play, and every- thing, really. But I have to say, I’m extremely fast assessing the situation and changing it. If something doesn’t quite work, I change it really quickly into something else and I think I don’t tire the person. Then I’m really fast. And quite precise.
AI: It’s actually an incredible skill. You have this almost magical power that you can turn things around. Even the images that come out of it, they could be embarrassing if you were embarrassed. Like a situation that got out of control but you go with it. I was always thinking, Juergen is taking all the risks that there are. Even in choosing the images in the end. I feel when I’m working with dancers or performers that there is a moment when this can be super scary – to be together in a room, you don’t know yet what’s happening, you go this way, you go into a situa- tion you create together, in the moment. I had the feeling you have a similar way of working but you are so reckless (chuckles) in how you do this. You leave the space where everything feels safe and you go some- where and then you create a completely new thing and you kind of – in Germany we say entgleisen, let it derail in a way that is so freeing for everybody involved because nobody is feeling their embarrassment will still be embarrassing when the walls fall down and it’s open to the public, because you can also say, ‘Hey, that’s what we do’. And then you create something that becomes a new standard of how things could be. And for me, this is what your work was about when I was a young kid that went to art school in the first place, like ’99, 2000. I was obsessed by seeing your work and seeing it being like that and being open. Go-Sees, for example, the book you made in, was it in ‘98?
JT: ‘88/89
![Juergen Teller- Raquel Zimmermann and Charlotte Rampling, Paradis XVIII, 2009](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663cce9f72b01ec82441a33b_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-2.webp)
AI: This whole project, it was as if the girls that came to your door and the situations that you had with them, it was 20 minutes maybe or five, but then they came to me. It was transporting something completely dif- ferent. It was such a beautiful experience for me and it still is. I revisited some of the pictures before today because I wanted to go back to this moment where it struck me so hard. That was the starting point for me. JT: It was for me also the starting point where I thought about photogra- phy in a different way, as sort of conceptional, that it could be more than a picture here, a picture there.
AI: And taking the risks and leaving the space that’s safe also has to do with leaving your home and what’s familiar to you. Was that a decision you took, to leave the place you grew up and also leaving your appren- ticeship? I mean, you left to go to the UK, right?
JT: In ’86, yeah. Because I didn’t want to go to the army. And I didn’t want to do civilian service either. I studied photography in Munich for two years and it was so exciting for me, photography, that if I’d done ci- vilian service I would have fucked it up. I would not have had that drive. And then I realised in school I didn’t give a shit about English because I thought, I’m from this small village, I’m going to be a bowmaker, who cares about English? (Chuckles) And I suddenly realised, ‘Ooh, I want to see the world, I want to travel the world, I better learn English’ (chuck- les). Quite frankly America was too far and too weird so I just drove my car to England with my camera. (laughs)
You know, back in the day everything was slower. Everything was naïve and innocent. Juergen Teller
AI: It’s interesting because you still chose a place where there is some sea between you and Germany and you and the village. I know that your mum still lives there and you go and visit her often but thinking about you and how you left that place and where you’re coming from, I could relate to this – it’s a long fucking way from where you were to today.
JT: Yes.
AI: To be able to do that there are a lot of things in between and some- times to go that far there has to be an ocean in between.
JT: That’s what I mean when I said earlier about the sort of naivety. I had this total urge not to do the army, not to do civilian service, and I needed to learn English and I needed to leave and I just took my car, had my cameras, and I did not know a fucking single person in England. And I couldn’t speak English. I could just say, (puts on pronounced German accent) ‘This is red, my car is blue’. That was it. It was totally ridiculous.
AI: And was it a blue car?
JT: No, it was a red car, actually (chuckles). If I think back it’s insanity. You would be like, oh my God, what am I doing? You wouldn’t do it when you’re older. It’s totally crazy. I did not know a single person, couldn’t speak English and I was there.
AI: How did it happen then, your first work situation with photography?
T: Well, that was the beautiful thing. It took me a long time getting my head around talking a little bit of English because I’m a little bit dyslexic. Visually I’m there but languages I’m not good at. At that time in the mid- eighties there were still these record covers. And these album sleeves are like art pieces.
AI: Absolutely. AI: This whole project, it was as if the girls that came to your door and the situations that you had with them, it was 20 minutes maybe or five, but then they came to me. It was transporting something completely dif- ferent. It was such a beautiful experience for me and it still is. I revisited some of the pictures before today because I wanted to go back to this moment where it struck me so hard. That was the starting point for me. JT: It was for me also the starting point where I thought about photogra- phy in a different way, as sort of conceptional, that it could be more than a picture here, a picture there.
AI: And taking the risks and leaving the space that’s safe also has to do with leaving your home and what’s familiar to you. Was that a decision you took, to leave the place you grew up and also leaving your appren- ticeship? I mean, you left to go to the UK, right?
JT: In ’86, yeah. Because I didn’t want to go to the army. And I didn’t want to do civilian service either. I studied photography in Munich for two years and it was so exciting for me, photography, that if I’d done ci- vilian service I would have fucked it up. I would not have had that drive. And then I realised in school I didn’t give a shit about English because I thought, I’m from this small village, I’m going to be a bowmaker, who cares about English? (Chuckles) And I suddenly realised, ‘Ooh, I want to see the world, I want to travel the world, I better learn English’ (chuck- les). Quite frankly America was too far and too weird so I just drove my English was still very, very slight and I worked with this stylist called Si-mon Foxton who was brilliant, for i-D magazine, and he suddenly camewith all these black muscly guys, really buff, and I was like, wow, this ismaybe even scarier than the girls. But it was a beautiful learning pro-cess of understanding and playing around. You know, back in the dayeverything was slower. Everything was naïve and innocent. Where nowa photographer immediately wants an advertising job and immediatelythinks they’re the greatest and takes everything that’s done before andthings like that. Back in the day it was so slow and it was kind of goodthat it was so slow.
AI: It’s interesting to me that the first things were the covers. The covers of a record can be the most iconic thing in the world.
JT: Totally.
AI: The cover comes out, the music is almost playing the background music to the cover, or the cover is giving the personality. It’s the door to the artist. Especially in those times when there wasn’t such a quick turnaround in music.
JT: Yes, and I remember I went from my village into town, into Erlangen, and would go into this shop, and very often I bought records I didn’t know who the fuck it was. Because the cover looked so great. You didn’t have much money but you had to have that cover and the music was good. Never got it wrong!
![Juergen Teller- Self-portrait with Snow White, Bubenreuth, 2002](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663ccef2b5e4b6fc496ec6de_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-3.webp)
![Juergen Teller- Kurt in studio, London, 2023](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663ccf14a08a7c46f150a973_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-4.webp)
![Juergen Teller- Saint Laurent legs in studio, London, 2023](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663ccf2c4e9b79a9b974843b_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-5.webp)
![Juergen Teller- Forest No. 93, South Tyrol, 2020](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663ccf59db0048011eaf6e1e_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-6.webp)
![Juergen Teller- Iggy Pop No.23, Miami, 2022](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663ccf69053d27d9a8221eee_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-7.webp)
AI: I was revisiting those Nirvana tour images and me spending my twenties in Frankfurt, these images were earlier, I think. Those images eapt into pop culture so fast, and so this was this whole idea of how life can be. I didn’t think of it as, oh, that’s photography, that’s a record cover, that’s a story in a fashion magazine. It was all images that were opening a world for me. It was a way for me to get out of the little German town to a bigger town. I needed to live the freedom even before I knew what it was about. I feel that still when I look at these tour images. You were in the middle of all that. You must have been with them all the time?
JT: I met them at Heathrow and we flew together to Berlin and then Berlin to Hamburg, and then Frankfurt and Munich.
AI: So it was a Germany tour?
JT: Yeah, and at that time, I was so poor. I remember it was November and it was dreadful weather and I had no money and I suddenly got this phone call from an American magazine to photograph this band, and it was Nirvana and I called these guys from i-D and The Face and it was just before Nevermind came out but they played Nevermind and I said ‘Hey, what about this band?’ Most of them hadn’t even heard of them. I thought, ‘I don’t fucking care, I’m leaving this country and it gives me a free pass to visit a friend in Berlin, my cousin in Hamburg, a friend in Frankfurt and then in Munich I’m back at my mum’s’.
Yeah. And he(Francis Bacon)had this seminal, super important show at the Grand Palais in 1971 I think. Afterwards I was coming out of the Pompidou and that’s when Dovile said, ‘You’re going to have a show at the Grand Palais one day.’ And I was like, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’ Juergen Teller
AI: So it was your tour as well.
JT: Yes, it was! Details magazine had budget at the time, so I earned a little money. And I was fucking blown away. Already at Heathrow airport I thought, ‘Oh my God, those guys, that’s something’. And then when we got to Berlin first we went to the soundcheck. I had no idea what their mu- sic was like. I was like, fuck, this is incredible. And then a couple of hours later at the concert when everybody was there, hearing it again back to back live, it was like [makes a sound of head exploding], it opened my mind, it had a huge impact on me.
AI: Also on me, not only the music but Kurt Cobain and the way he carried his figure and the view of the public. Somehow it resonates a lot, still now. You said there was an urge in you. I feel this is how art is made. It wants out of you. It has to be. And now, no matter if it’s a commercial job or...
JT: Yes. Instinct and urge to do. Totally.
AI: When I was 18, the first song I bought, there was this need. I was float- ing around with music, with images. It was a constant negotiation of the direction. This need for something was always there, and the urge to go somewhere. When I read your exhibition title it’s so beautiful because you feel like you’re part of your life story when you read them, and they read like a poem. I remember we met in 2016, it was right after I met Eliza, you had a shoot for Man About Town and Lotta Volkova was doing the styling.
JT: Yes, yes.
AI: And Eliza and I both ended up in this shoot. Okay, she was a model and was doing Balenciaga.
JT: That was the beginning of Balenciaga, right?
AI: Exactly. It was 2016. I had just met her and I was doing Angst at the time, that piece, and I was like, I don’t have time, but I’ll do it if you come and photograph my show. I wanted there to be a trade between us. And then there was the shoot and we went to this motorhome in the suburbs of Paris and you had this Kunsthalle Bonn show and you met Eliza and I in his situation of being crazy in love and then we ended up without clothes in this motorhome and you photographed us. There were all these people around us and you were taking photos and we were making out on the floor and I was like, that felt actually pretty good. I felt super safe. And then there was this exhibition and was there something with ‘need’ or ‘life’ in there as well?
JT: Yes, yes – ‘enjoy your life’.
AI: Exactly! Our image suddenly in an art show, blown up. It’s amazing how an image travels from you, from a shoot. I was so proud it was on the cover of a men’s magazine.
JT: (chuckles)
AI: You made me so happy with that. (laughs) And then these images are your work and you put them in a show with other images and suddenly they tell another story. They don’t tell the story of clothes anymore or this cool location or the editorial. It’s a story about two people in love and I had this feeling when I heard about your show at the Grand Palais – I mean, it’s THE show an artist can have. The Ritterschlag [the knighting], you know? Die Krönung [the coronation].
JT: You know, if I can say something?
AI: Yeah.
JT: When I started going out with Dovile, and I can’t quite remember... [Dovile speaks in the background]
JT: Oh yes! We went together to the Pompidou in 2016, to the Francis Bacon exhibition, and we were like...
AI: Blown away.
JT: Yeah. And he had this seminal, super important show at the Grand Palais in 1971 I think. Afterwards I was coming out of the Pompidou and that’s when Dovile said, ‘You’re going to have a show at the Grand Palais one day.’ And I was like, ‘Don’t be so stupid.’ (laughs) ‘That’s not gonna happen’. And she was like, ‘I’m going to promise you, it’s going to happen. Believe it’. I kind of completely forgot about it and now it’s happening! Fucking amazing. (chuckles)
DD: Let me know what you would like, give me a couple of years! (laughs)
AI: Dovile and you, when you just met, we were together in Paris with Eliza, I remember you telling me, ‘Hey, I want you to meet somebody, I just met her and I’m so in love’. We were going for dinner and I was think- ing, this is such a special moment because through love there is an abil- ity to unleash power in us. I was with Eliza and there was dark romcom between us and I was looking at it like, this is beautiful. I saw something in your relationship that’s so powerful. And this show, Dovile may have wished it but it’s your entire oeuvre and your brilliant work that brought you there and it comes to a very important time. How did the title come about?
![Juergen Teller- Dovile pregnant, London, 2023](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5cc60ba2b2ea2ebc993540be/663cd02c72b01ec82442f8ab_JUERGEN%20TELLER%20-8.webp)