A biography for Juergen Tellerhasn’t been written yet.
“A few brands have asked me to design shorts for them. I'm not sure about that. I don't want to have them as a mass product, and suddenly everybody is walking around in them.”
“When I became a father, all that stuff rose up again from the back of my mind. I suddenly realised how uninvolved my father had been in my life.”
“I just want to do everything as good as I possibly can.”
“I'm interested in the person I photograph. The world is so beautiful as it is; there's so much going on, which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me.”
“For me, cinema is very important. I grew up with television; then, as a teenager, you discover cinema.”
“When I came to London in 1986, I was amazed at how prudish everyone was.”
“I never work with a screen. Other photographers have this black thing around, and they go back and look at it. I'd rather spend the time with the subject, photographing or discussing or talking, than staring at this thing. I'd rather look at what's going on.”
“I just really like women, and I like men, and I like children, and I like eating, and I like doing everything.”
“I'm interested in extrovert characters, people who are doing something. But I used to only be able to photograph people I was interested in or attracted to, either psychologically or physically. That all changed when I did the 'Go Sees.'”
“It was really inspiring to be in West London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Mark Lebon's Crunch Studios, where I met people like Ray Petri, Neneh Cherry, Judy Blame, Nick and Barry Kamen, Zoe Bedeaux, and Venetia Scott.”
“I try and photograph people as they are. I do not want to hide anything. I want to bring across a personality, a humanity. It is not a case of model A or model B against a white background. I am interested in the person.”
“I've never really understood tattoos. I mean, it's your body - why would you wanna scar it? I don't mind other people's tattoos, but I just never got it.”
“I never really think of anyone as models, even the models.”
“Normally, whenever I try to photograph my mother, she is extremely impatient and will only stand for a minute and insists on knowing exactly what I'm doing.”
“I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.”
“I don't care about fashion at all.”
“There was a stage in my career when I started to have problems with the vanity aspect of the subject. I got frustrated and bored with it. Then I thought, actually, how does it feel to be photographed? That's when I started to photograph myself. That was an incredibly important moment, and it opened up my work tremendously.”
“For my 50th birthday, my cousin Helmut gave me the most profound, beautiful, and striking present. He made books out of my dad's slide photographs, which were stored and forgotten. Looking at those books made me cry.”
“It's important to spend time with your work. That's when you see it, when you have a feeling.”
“I find it quite fascinating to see how the body works.”