“Photographs can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way,” Susan Sontag observed. Hers was a reference to more prurient activities, but she also allowed that desire could—emerges throughout these pages directly and indirectly, as both an impulse and a state of mind. The manufacture of desire might be fashion’s and advertising’s most consistent product and its very lifeblood. Ubiquitous and irreverent, Juergen Teller’s photographs upend our vocabulary of glamour and aspiration, trading conventional beauty for the more peculiar. Whether it is a luxe handbag, a beaming, wide-eyed baby, or a lithe model making her way to a casting, his binding agent is a hard flash and an arresting directness. He is at the center of a system of material want—but doesn’t always make it look very desirable.
