Juergen Teller

Thu 28 May 1998 - Fri 24 Jul 1998

This event is part of our Past Programme

A grey-suited man dives off a high-rise, and plummets to an uncertain end in a London street below. A jacket bursts spontaneously into flames in a dank, concrete basement; a brief, bright beacon lighting the unremitting urban gloom. A cyclist has toppled off his bike and lies unconscious on the tarmac, perfectly frozen at the moment of impact. Remarkable yet understated dramas, unfolding somewhere behind the scenes - this is a hallmark of Juergen Teller's photography.

These images are also remarkable for being fashion adverts, selling Jigsaw's Autumn/Winter Menswear Collection. German photographer Juergen Teller shot to fame in the 80s for his work in i-D, Arena and The Face. Alongside contemporaries Corinne Day, David Sims and Nigel Shafran, he has been credited with changing the face of fashion photography, away from the slick surfaces and impossible gloss of the 80s, to a more authentic realism for the 90. This exhibition, Teller's first major solo show in London, blends and bends photographic genres, mixing portraits, fashion photographs and landscapes. Shots of supermodels and celebrities join scenes of family life, streetscapes and pastorals.

What unifies the diversity of Teller's work is an intimate identification with his subjects and a particular response to a contemporary world. Fashion - Cocteau's 'most impermanent of the arts' - has provided Teller an arena from which to explore a singular notion of beauty. While fashion tends to cover up all flaws, for Teller, beauty is to be found somewhere outside the image of perfection. Off-scene, backstage, in the ephemeral pose, the unrehearsed moment, in fragments of beautiful bodies - an unshaven armpit, a hand languorously holding a cigarette, a bare foot. Beauty is here inscribed in the real rather than the fantastic: for Teller, photographs 'should provide a suggestion from which you can take your fantasies further...but fantasy has to be written into the picture in a way that is believable'. He makes 'pictures you can smell', their distilled, direct realism accounting for a heightened sexual charge. Clothes invariably understudy the body as protagonist of the drama.

Teller's is a deceptively casual aesthetic which shifts the focus from seductive surface to affective depth. The emotional range is wide, sometimes brutally direct such as Teller's portrait of chain-smoking, bruised, scarred, and menstruating supermodel Kristen McMenamy (which gave us one of the most iconic fashion images of the 90s). Sometimes poignant - a dead, frozen dog tossed into a dustbin in Czechoslovakia; sometimes quietly humorous - Lola, Teller's baby daughter. Whether photographing Bjork or his brother-in-law, Teller never imposes an image onto his subjects: instead, as if holding up a mirror, he reflects them back to themselves. He leaves us sharing in the moment of intimacy, and a sense that we are looking at fragments of real lives lived.

Juergen Teller was born in Erlangen, Germany in 1964, and after a short apprenticeship as a bowmaker, began his career as a photographer. He studied photography at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt for Photographie in Munich, and moved to London in 1986

Curated by Kate Bush