Juergen Teller has never wanted to make the viewer feel comfortable. His whole career as a fine art and fashion photographer has been spent undermining the big norms of beauty and aesthetics and all that jazz. And this show of early work and a couple of new projects sure does set your teeth on edge.
It’s the early work that does it. ‘Go-Sees’ is based on the fashion world practice of models being sent by their agencies to photographers’ studios. It’s an audition with no actual prospect of work, they’re just there to prostrate themselves in the hope that their beauty will win them future bookings. Gross, right? Teller thought so too. He found the whole thing bizarre, so decided to spend a whole year documenting all the models showing up at his place, framing each one in the street through his door.
Some show off and do acrobatic stretches, some look miserable, some are confident, some smoke, some stand with a pushy parent. He’s clearly aware of the ickiness here. In an accompanying video piece, you see the words ‘this is not safe, keep off’ sprayed on a metal grate outside his studio, police sirens scream past during the interviews with the models. The symbolism is obvious.
In a post-Weinstein world, Teller choosing to show this early work is either cleverly knowing, aggressively confrontational, stupidly ignorant or just plain arrogant. Maybe Teller's point is that the fashion industry is really messed up. If so, maybe he’s making you, the viewer, complicit in the way it exploits these young women. Maybe, in an era which sees sexual allegations against giants of film, fashion and music that have gone on for years apparently ignored, he's saying that we as consumers of Weinstein’s films, Terry Richardson’s photography or R Kelly’s music, are the ones with ultimate power.
If that is what he's trying to say, it fails. The aesthetic result isn’t much less gross than if it had been by a photographer who wasn’t questioning the nature of the whole thing. These women are still stood on the street, still asking for work. Are we meant to applaud Teller for ‘humanising’ them? Are we meant to pat him on the back for finding the whole thing super weird?
Maybe it worked as a statement, an experiment or a confrontation back in the 1990s, but the contemporary context has changed. And it’s made even more uncomfortable by being shown next to a new project done with a bunch of schoolkids, like Teller is some kind of saint.
I’m not saying Teller isn't some kind of saint, or that he is. But whatever his intentions, the fashion industry and the art world (see the case of Artforum publisher Knight Landesman) have some serious issues with abuse of power, and I’m not convinced this series works as either a criticism or even as a wry, winky comment on it. By not being enough of either, it risks becoming the very thing it’s fighting against.
@eddyfrankel