Juergen Teller’s iconic overexposed flash photography has
become a huge influence in my own work lately. I’m most drawn to the raw simplicity of the ads
he has done for Marc Jacobs. Teller uses color in a very purposeful way; the
colors flow and aid the overall mood of the image, he makes primary colors and
pastels feel new again. His images, even those that seem more candid and
autobiographical have a design quality to them and the colors seem premeditated.
Yet even with the high design quality infused in his images, the content is experimental
half-baked ideas. I have no doubt that there are probably thousands of his
images that simply don’t work, but the photographs he finds that do work, feel
so complete in a way that makes me less afraid to experiment with my own
content. His work feels bold, perhaps because he does not always photograph the
“pretty nude”, but a raw, distorted nude. The figures are awkward and the
settings are bare, and his flash ads a harsh hardness, but I fall all over
myself when I look at his work.
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