Teller juergen

self-portrait by JUERGEN TELLER
interview by OLIVIER ZAHM

FUR COAT CÉLINE

OLIVIER ZAHM — Do you separate your commercial fashion pictures from the non-commissioned ones? It seems that you don’t.

JUERGEN TELLER — I separate them very carefully. A commissioned advertising campaign or certain magazine editorials are literally different from, let’s say, my series Irene im Wald [Irene in the Forest], for which I went for walks with my mother through our backyard forest over a period of one year and wrote a text underneath. Nobody asks me to do that — or to do a five-month project with school children aged six and seven. There’s no deadline, no commercial value, no clients, no publicists, no vanity: it’s purely what I want to do! Commercial fashion photography has to have a purpose, a value. I have to carefully listen to the requirements of the client, which…