Purple Magazine
— F/W 2012 issue 18
Juergen Teller
photos from his new book pictures and text, published by Steidl/ Zeit Magazin
Octopussy
I’ve always liked spaghetti nero. Delicious and one gets black teeth from it.
I photographed a friend of mine in Rome in my hotel room with ink all over her body. I laid the octopus on my bed and called it Octopussy.
Cerith’s Birthday
I took this picture at the birthday party of my friend the artist Cerith Wyn Evans. He loves being photographed. When he saw the photo, he asked, “Please can we use the picture for my obituary?”
With Lily Cole on the Rubbish Dump
The Vogue party in India had fireworks and a lot of palaver, but as a place to take naked pictures of Lily Cole it wasn’t quite right. And anyway, it turned out taking naked pictures in India is actually a terrible idea. Nothing’s allowed there. Lily got bored at the party; she wanted to start working. But where? We crept off into the darkness until we saw a bit of light on a garage and a rubbish dump. “Just lie down in it,” I said, and she did. Suddenly puppies came snuffling up to her. It was only the next morning, on the plane, that Lily rang me and started worrying about rabies and all kinds of stuff. Thank God the picture was good, I thought — it’ll all be okay, I hope.
Bareback Riding
This is my last column for the magazine Die Zeit. I’d particularly like to thank Christoph Amend, the editor-in-chief, and Andreas Wellnitz, the picture editor, who had the idea to give me this job. We all had a great time working on it, and I admire everyone at the magazine, whose enthusiasm and commitment make it so brilliant. In increasingly conservative, economical and politically correct times it will get more and more difficult to find a place to be able to say anything. I was particularly delighted by the many readers’ letters we received. If you read them you’ll never want to leave the house again. Photographs with wilder stories tend to stay home anyway — good stories to tell over dinner. Die Zeit made me engage with my work, week after week, and write something in German, which I hadn’t done since school. Sometimes, proudly, I said to my wife, “I’m writing every week; somehow I’m a writer now.” She laughed and just said, “You’re not a writer.” Annoyed, the way my son gets offended, I said, “You can’t even read that shit. You don’t understand German.” We both laughed. But my wife’s always right. It’s a good feeling, sitting in shorts on a horse with no saddle, feeling the wet muscles between your legs. You feel free.
