Juergen Teller, fashion's most divisive photographer: 'We're in the most uncertain times since World War II'
It is no hard task to find Juergen Teller’s studio. On a west London road, among rows of beige two-up, two-down terraced houses, his 60-metre deep plot stands in pale concrete glory. An assistant opens the door to a gaping, garage-looking space where, in 2016, Teller posed naked on a donkey to celebrate the build’s completion (the following year, his studio was nominated for the Stirling Prize and won the Riba London Building of the Year award). I wind up to the second floor to sit and wait for the 60-year-old and his creative collaborator and wife of three years, Dovile Drizyte, 41, surrounded by relics of Teller’s nearly four-decade career. Contact sheets date back to 1997, there are stacks of Document Journals and Pop magazines, and great coffee-table books sit full of his famous fashion commercial work, from Barney’s to countless handbag brands.
When the pair arrive it starts to rain. Teller, not famous for by a tree for W Magazine’s annual awards season portfolio in 2021, the actor tweeted it ‘was the fastest of my life. 20 seconds, two clicks’. After the 2024 iteration of the W issue — see, Natalie Portman wearing a Dior gown in a tourist shop — debate raged again. People call him lazy, others idolise his wit.
