The Grubby Glamour of Juergen Teller’s Photography
Lifestyle
A few years ago, I worked at a style magazine that was running a cover story featuring Kanye West, with pictures shot by Juergen Teller, one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. In one image, West could be seen standing in front of a white backdrop, presumably in a photo studio. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, and boots—his only adornment a thin gold chain—and his arms were thrown limply to his sides. With his eyes closed and his upturned features lit by the harsh glare of a flash, he looked genuinely drained, but also, somehow, glamorous, in his indifferent surrender to the viewer’s gaze. On the night of the issue’s close, as I was printing out the story in order to proofread it, I looked down and realized that I was wearing the same outfit as West: a black T-shirt, jeans, and a thin gold chain. Spreading my arms and throwing my head back against the copy room’s white wall, I asked my co-worker Shawn to take my picture. It was three in the morning—the magazine’s issue closes tended to run punishingly late—and in the photo, which Shawn took with his iPhone, I was captured as I stood, exhausted, next to the Xerox machine, in the sharp neon glare of a midtown office. This was no posh photo studio in London, and I was certainly no Kanye. Still, when the two photos were placed side by side, their aesthetic was not so different.
The New Yorker
Mar 02, 2021