A high-profile commercial career usually has the high-brow art world cocking a snook at photographers, whose medium of choice gets a hard time from the cognoscenti as it is against the longer-established worlds of painting and sculpture. One man with a foot planted very successfully in both art and commercial camps is Juergen Teller, who has negotiated the transition from fashion and celebrity in the 1990s to more abstract and intimate subjects in his later gallery work with aplomb.
The shorn head of Sinead O’Connor on the cover of break-up mix-tape staple Nothing Compares 2 U launched Teller’s rise to stardom, and for a while after that it was all A-listers, posh frocks and underwear, but this retrospective at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London looks at his more recent and more personal work.
The odd famous face still crops up, but in a much more intimate context, and the minutiae of Teller’s day-to-day life and the surroundings of his home in Suffolk and Germany play a much more prominent role in the Woo collection than Kate Moss’s mug. See for yourself until March 17. Readers interested in the arc of Teller’s career might like to cast their eyes over this exhibition by David LaChapelle.
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Bjork and son, Iceland 1993
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Kate Moss, No.12, Gloucestershire, 2010
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Mother with Crocodile, Bubenreuth, Germany 2002
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Sigmund Freud’s Couch (Malgosia), London, 2006
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Pettitoe, Suffolk, 2011
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Cerith, Suffolk 2011 (The Keys to the House No.28, Suffolk 2011)
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Teenager, Suffolk 2010
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: No.12 of the series ‘Irene im Wald’, 2012
© Juergen Teller
Photographer: Juergen Teller
Title: Smiling Ed, London 2005
© Juergen Teller
