December 2, 2025 |
Juergen Teller, much like his work, says a lot with a little. These days, he shoots mostly with an iPhone, having graduated from film and, later, digital.
“It’s not so important for me,” he says, matter-of-factly, of his device choice. He’s video-calling from his studio in Notting Hill. Wearing a flamingo-pink sweater – he’s renowned for his neon colour-blocking – Teller talks slowly and deliberately in a light Bavarian accent. Just days ago, he opened a new survey-style exhibition spanning three decades of work, some of which was shot no longer than three weeks before. In the background, his wife and creative consort of eight years, Dovile Drizyte, can occasionally be heard, chiming in when Teller can’t think of a name or the exact word he needs.
Pope Francis in Venice No.3, Giudecca Women’s Prison, 2024
The show in question, you are invited, is being held in Onassis Ready, a new location set up by the Onassis Foundation in Athens. The title is characteristically open but also positive and – the clue’s in the name – welcoming. Rather than funnelling a mid-career show into a tight, curatorial conceit, Teller has instead collated a variety of fashion and art photography that speaks to both the breadth and depth of his world. During our conversation, he speaks a lot about storytelling, leading me to think this, if anything, is the theme. There is, nonetheless, a backstory tied to the project. While on assignment for Harper’s Bazaar Italia – shooting models in churches – a leaflet from a church came through the letterbox with “you are invited” printed on it. (He holds it up to his computer’s camera.)
‘You Are Invited’, London, 2025
For most people, this would be little more than a mundane idiosyncrasy in their day, but for Teller, it concluded a series of meaningful events that culminated in the show’s final name. Earlier, he had been given the opportunity to photograph Pope Francis, who he’d wanted to shoot for a long time, partly because he felt Francis was photogenic, but mainly because he thought Francis had admirable moral standing. Commissioned by the Vatican, the images were taken during a visit to a women’s prison in Venice almost a year before his death. “It was a deep experience – how he talked to them and how these women reacted to him being there,” he says. “He had an incredible aura; he’s the most positive Pope there was.”
from left: ‘Symposium of Love’, 2025
The photos are playful, heart-warming and, in true Teller style, the kind you think you could take but, for some reason – framing and innate talent, probably – you couldn’t. They join myriad others at Onassis Ready. There’s the stunning image of Björk and her six-year-old son Sindri in an Icelandic hot spring for The Face; African snails devouring a peach; Victoria Beckham crawling out of her own brand’s shopping bag; his ugly-beautiful portraits of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Maggie Smith for Loewe; and the viral animal-paint, bum-crack-revealing campaign for Duran Lantink’s AW25 collection.
from left: ‘Guten Morgen Sonnenschein’, 2025
Having staged countless exhibitions – not least his blockbuster, i need to live (2023-24), at the Grand Palais – over the course of his career, Teller has now moved past any clear demarcation between his commercial and art world work. In 2013, for his ICA London show, Woo!, he separated the two intentionally. “The kind of work I did with Duran or Jonathan Anderson [for Dior and Loewe] goes beyond just a fashion photograph,’ he says. True to this now-melded art-work life, you’ll also find personal works, such as this year’s Guten Morgen Sonnenschein (Good Morning, Sunshine) diptyque series. In the morning, he photographs the Japanese drip coffee he makes for himself and Drizyte, and what directly surrounds him. The latter might include a child’s cot, Drizyte in bed, a toy kitchen, or a novelty clock. He says of the show’s contents. “I don’t want to differentiate it as, ‘Oh, this is just my fashion work, or this is just my private work.’”
from left: Märchenweiher, Bubenreuth, 2008; ‘The Spear in My Arse’, Pictures and Text, London, 2012
Teller, who was invited three years ago to show at the space by Onassis’s artistic director, Afroditi Panagiotakou, is clear that, despite the varied works on show, the exhibition is site-specific. He cites a photo he took of Pamela Anderson on a Greek island reading Plato’s Republic, as well as shots of Marie-Chantal, Crown Princess of Greece, and her daughter, Princess Maria-Olympia. I note one portfolio of images depicting Drizyte and Teller in double-exposure, naked and frolicking in the sand. In the accompanying catalogue, the latter shots are complemented by an excerpt from Aristophanes’ speech given during Plato’s Symposium detailing a lost third gender that comprised two sets of everything – hands, legs, genitals, etc. The text posits that (heterosexual) love is the pursuit of this third gender. “We do everything together, from the morning to the evening,” says Teller of his relationship with Drizyte. “Even our thinking becomes very, very similar. I wanted this idea of our two bodies morphing into each other.”
from left: ‘The Myth No.50’, Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, 2022; ‘Leg, snails and peaches No.36’, London 2017
For Teller, the show is his “most personal” to date, but an exposé, it’s not. He’s clear that while he might be treating, say, his kitchen at home as a studio or groggy mornings with Drizyte as photo ops, one is only getting a “fairytale” depiction. As he puts it, you don’t know what his living room looks like or where he goes on holiday, nor do you have him on Instagram (his account is private). Of course, public vulnerability has been a longstanding part of his practice. In this vein, the show features his famed Father and Son self-portrait. Teller, starkers, is posed by his father’s grave, one foot resting on a football, a beer in his left hand and a cigarette in the other. His relationship with his father, Walter, was icy. “Whether it’s the suicide of my father, a photograph of my mother, the Go-Sees project [a ’90s series documenting teenage models at castings] or when I photographed Nirvana [in 1991],” Teller says, “they’re all things that mean a lot to me.”
The personal aspect of Teller’s work is also apparent in a growing self-awareness. He started doing self-portraits around 2000. “I got a bit bored with the vanity of celebrities and I wanted to [see] how it feels to be photographed by yourself,” he says. He learned about himself as a subject and benefited from the simple fact that he was always around for work. “Is an actress or writer better or worse than myself?” Nowadays, this self-referentiality has become quite meta. His third child, Iggy, takes her name from Iggy Pop (he also has Lola, 28, and Ed, 21). Teller shot the musician in Miami in 2022 for Document Journal and enjoyed the experience. A little later, when the editors heard of his daughter’s name, they asked him to shoot her, too. At first, he wasn’t keen. “Every parent has cute pictures of their newborn babies. [It’s] a bit ridiculous,” he says. Then, it came to him. He’d restage his own photographs – Kate Moss with pink hair in bed, Victoria Beckham in the shopping bag, himself tied to a flurry of balloons – with his baby, instead, as the focus.
from left: Dovile pregnant, London, 2023; ‘Where we come from No.64’, 2024
There are also subtler nods to Teller-isms. In one of the diptyque images, we see only a pair of Asics and some rolled-down grey jeans. It’s unmistakably a Teller outfit (and image). The same could be said of a gritty shot for new magazine After Noon with Katharine Hamnett for a new run of political T-shirts. “I felt very close to Katherine because she gave me one of my first advertising jobs [for her brand] in the early ’90s and we worked together for years,” he says of this full-circle moment.
Unless you’re looking at Teller’s work as an amorphous whole, aesthetically strung together by a uniquely grungey, seemingly snapshot – it’s never a snapshot, he notes – style, it’s hard to build a throughline. Teller deals a lot in aphorisms. (“Certain things are just tragic or humorous or serious in nature, and that’s what life is.”) The results are deceivingly simple, unfussy and raw. But it’s only because of the grunt work behind them. “Everything is meticulously staged and worked on. I think a lot about how I want to execute something. Often, I experience something in life which has a big impact on me. I think things through, re-enact it and organise it that way.”
from left: Self-portrait with tyres, JW Anderson advertising calendar, London, 2021; ‘Where we come from No.38’, 2024
Evidently, Teller is a sensitive soul, visibly contemplative throughout the 45 minutes we share. He’s moved by both the obviously moving, such as a visit to Auschwitz, and the otherwise forgettable. For you are invited, it feels as if we’re witnessing a late-career show. There’s a roundness to it that professes his philosophy – to absorb and be sensitive to the world around you – not didactically, but through the experience of seeing every image together.
What does Teller hope people get from the show? He pauses for a whole 14 seconds. “Mmm,” he ponders. “A deep sense of adventure. Hopefully, they feel inspired about their own life and making their own choices.” That’s the invitation.
Juergen Teller’s ‘you are invited’ is on at Onassis Ready, Athens, until December 30. 10+ Issue 8 – FUTURE, JUBILEE, CELEBRATION – is on newsstands December 5. Pre-order your copy here.
