Juergen Teller, the Fashion Photographer Who Refuses to Make Anyone Look Perfect

Juergen Teller

Photo: Pascal Ferro / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 28, 1964 Erlangen
Occupation	Photographer
Awards	Citibank Prize for Photography · International Center of Photography Infinity Award, Special Presentation

Every few years someone asks whether Juergen Teller is a fashion photographer who wandered into museums or an artist who happens to be paid by Marc Jacobs. He has never seemed interested in the answer. The hard flash, the refusal to retouch and the habit of catching people a second before they were ready appear whether the sitter is a supermodel, a pope or his own mother walking through a Bavarian forest. What has changed in his late work is the weight he asks that style to carry: grief, faith, the grounds of Auschwitz, and a marriage photographed so closely that two bodies blur into one.

He grew up in Bubenreuth, a Franconian village near Erlangen where families like his made bows and bridges for violins. He started to learn the trade and had to quit when he developed an allergy to the wood. His father, with whom he had a troubled relationship, took his own life at forty-seven, and that loss runs under almost everything Teller has made since.

Teller, born in Erlangen on 28 January 1964, studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich from 1984 to 1986, then learned English and moved to London at 22, partly to avoid German military service. He photographed Kylie Minogue for the artwork of Let’s Get to It, and in 1991 he followed Nirvana through Germany on the Nevermind tour. His picture of Kurt Cobain sprawled across a stack of plastic chairs is still among the images most tied to his name.

Fashion noticed him through a single cover. In 1996 Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin printed his nude portrait of Kristen McMenamy with the word “Versace” drawn in a heart across her chest, a joke at the industry’s expense that the industry loved. For spring 1998 Marc Jacobs, whose collections were styled by Teller’s then-partner Venetia Scott, hired him to shoot Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. The partnership ran until 2014 and produced some of the most discussed advertising of the period: Cindy Sherman beside the photographer himself, Sofia Coppola, Winona Ryder, Michael Stipe, and in 2008 Victoria Beckham with only her legs poking out of a giant Marc Jacobs shopping bag. Jacobs called it a comment on how celebrities are packaged and sold like products.

He also worked for Helmut Lang, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood, Louis Vuitton and Céline, where under Phoebe Philo he photographed Joan Didion, then 80, for the spring 2015 campaign. He refuses to retouch any commission, Hollywood covers included.

Commerce and art were never separate rooms for him. Go-Sees, his book of the young models who came by his studio hoping to be booked, appeared in 1999 and became a film two years later. In 2003 he won the Citibank Prize for Photography with work that mixed naked self-portraits and offcuts from celebrity assignments. With Charlotte Rampling, a long-time collaborator, he made Louis XV, published by Steidl in 2005. Fondation Cartier gave him a solo show in 2006, and a year later he was one of five artists representing Ukraine at the Venice Biennale. He was professor of photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg from 2014 to 2019. His surname means plate in German, and he has spent years printing portraits onto crockery and handing sitters plates to hold; the curator Francesco Bonami wrote that “a plate for him is like a kiss.”

That easy traffic between the advertising page and the museum wall is exactly what his critics hold against him. Reviewing Woo!, his 2013 retrospective at London’s ICA, Artlyst argued that his snapshot look, all tilted angles and blown-out flash, had once been a provocation and had become weightless, and that “cultural evolution has made what was once infuriating now seem just childish, tired even.” The objection has teeth: a style built to puncture glamour can become a brand of its own, and luxury houses have paid well for the puncture. What it misses is how much of the work was always about his family, from the picture of Teller naked at his father’s grave to his mother Irene posing between the open jaws of an alligator, and Dieter, the grumbling Franconian alter ego he played in a 2017 film.

The later turn came with Dovile Drizyte, the Lithuanian artist he married in 2021 and who is now his creative partner; his earlier marriage to the London gallerist Sadie Coles, with whom he has a son, Ed, ended in 2018. Their daughter Iggy is named after Iggy Pop. In December 2023 i need to live, curated by Thomas Weski with Teller and Drizyte and backed by Saint Laurent, made him the first living photographer to exhibit at the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris; its roughly one thousand works moved to the Triennale Milano until April 2024. Later that year Where we come from, at the Kunstpalais in Erlangen, set his childhood home beside Drizyte’s hometown of Kaunas.

The past two years have pulled him toward subjects his early career kept at a distance. At the Vatican’s request he photographed Pope Francis visiting the women’s prison on Giudecca during the 2024 Venice Biennale. With Drizyte and the publisher Gerhard Steidl he spent days at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation; the result, Auschwitz Birkenau, published in 2025 with a text by Christoph Heubner, is a 448-page inventory of barracks, fences, parking signs and souvenir shops. Both bodies of work hung in you are invited, the survey that opened Onassis Ready, a former plastics factory in Athens, from October to December 2025. Its newest series, Symposium of Love, shows Teller and Drizyte naked on a Greek beach in overlapping exposures, a reading of the myth Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium. “I want to capture everything in my photographs: tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity,” he told Dazed.

The commercial work has not stopped. In January 2026 Moncler released its first summer collection with Rick Owens in a campaign Teller shot, in which Owens, his wife Michèle Lamy, Teller and Drizyte swap kisses in pairs. This summer Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin showed Guten Morgen Sonnenschein, diptychs that pair the coffee Teller makes every morning with a book, an artwork, one of Iggy’s paintings or Drizyte asleep. The series opens at Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris on 7 November and runs until 16 January 2027. The photographer who spent decades declining to flatter supermodels has ended up building a love story out of a morning coffee, and he is shooting it with the same refusal to tidy anything up.

Tags: art, artists, Juergen Teller, photographers, Victoria Beckham, Charlotte Rampling

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