The art of fashion

Claire Bishop11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Unlike Wolfgang Tillmans, who is well known for straddling both sides of the fashion/art photography divide, Juergen Teller's reputation is founded solely on his unsparing, anti-glamorous advertising and editorial work. And, unlike his fellow countryman, Tillmans, for whom every detail of the world is contrived to hold a fragment of magic, Teller seeks only to capture beauty through the candid warts-and-all reality of both people and places.

So it's hard to know what to make of this shift into "art", which comes three years after the Photographer's Gallery showed his vast blown-up pictures of assorted supermodels in the grungy buff. Now the prints are uniformly small and hung in non-thematic clusters: Kate Moss next to his relatives next to Barbara Cartland next to a kitten next to the interior of a Bavarian carpentry workshop next to his wife.

These juxtapositions can have an unfortunate levelling effect: Teller seems as tied to his roots (there are pictures of his mother tending his father's grave) as he is to the bouquet of flowers sent to him by Donatella Versace, and nothing intrinsically differentiates the grimace of Yves Saint Laurent from a picture of his baby boy. Still, it's an intriguing, diaristic patchwork that reflects the intertwining paths of his life and career.

The 25-minute Go See video gives movement to these moments: when models roll up to Teller's door hoping he'll use them in a shoot, he turns on the video camera and starts asking pointed questions. Their palpable discomfort forms a pleasing antidote to their vanity or wincesome immaturity. It also encapsulates the excruciating awkwardness of every first meeting or interview and soars above the innumerable docu-soaps that cover this same terrain.

But I wonder if Teller's no makeup and harsh-flash photography is overly dependent on his sitters for impact: cast this eye on a panoply of people you don't recognise and Teller's deliberately casual realism is no more interesting than going through the family snapshots of a stranger. But it works wonders on the famous, the beautiful and the overphotographed, giving you a sense of immediacy and spontaneity that fellow fash-mag photographers (such as Rankin) could only dream of attaining.

Until 16 December, Modern Art Inc. E2. Tel: 020 7739 2081.

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