Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition by photographer Juergen Teller. The show will be Teller’s first gallery exhibition in the United States and will consist of two projects: Go-Sees and Miss Worlds.
Juergen Teller was born in Erlangen, Germany in 1964. He studied at Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, Germany before moving to London in the early 1980s. In England, Teller was introduced to the world of fashion photography and used his assignments at i-D, The Face, Index and W Magazines as resources from which he could nurture his own photographic sensibility. His work has been the subject of monographs by Taschen and Scalo. Juergen Teller continues to live and work in London.
Teller’s artistic aims and images go far beyond fashion photography. Instead, he uses his experiences and resources to develop characters and create stories for his viewers. In his personal work, his images convey wishes and desires that are never fully expressed. Narratives exist and unravel beyond the frame.
In the Go-Sees from 1998, Teller chronicles a year of meetings with aspiring models. During a Go-See encounter, an agency will send models to a photographer to introduce new faces. Instead of taking posed photographs during the meeting, Teller chose to take shots of the arrival or departure of every woman. Each month is separately framed and contains the images of every woman that came to his door. The result is a calendar record of the pressure for a photographer to find a new face and for a model to be discovered. The doorway in each shot becomes a charged site and a border describing the politics of inclusion and acceptability.
The Miss World project began when the Goethe Institute of Caracas asked Teller to photograph Miss Venezuela. When the Miss World Competition came to London in November of 1999, Teller expanded his scope and took portraits of the contestants from each country. Here, they will be exhibited for the first time. Similar to the Go-Sees, the women of Miss World are not idealized images posed in a situation. Rather, Teller shoots each woman as a story in herself.