Name: Date: NOV 14, 2021

News no . Country:

Source:https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/juergen-teller-interview/index.html

Juergen Teller's photographs

go far beyond provocation
Re-framing ideas of sex, fame and beauty, there's more to the
German image-maker's archive than meets the eye.

Photographer Juergen Teller's latest book, "Donkey Man and Other

Stories," is a 608-page tome of pictures taken over the course of
three decades. The staggering story behind the title and cover
image -- a self-portrait of the German photographer laying naked
across the back of a donkey -- is told 50 pages in.

A short passage called "The Donkey Ride" details a harrowing

incident that took place in Turkey in the mid-1980s. As Teller writes,
he and a former girlfriend endured a long and frightening bus
journey that took them to a desert town where his partner began
feeling so unwell she ended up in hospital. While taking a break
from her bedside, Teller ventured out for a walk. He ended up
accepting a donkey ride from a man who, unbeknownst to Teller,
would sexually assault him on the animal's back.

He managed to fight his attacker off but the details of the story are
grim, and the experience impacted him so deeply he was left
unable to talk about it for years after. "I didn't tell anyone about it,"
he said during an interview in his London studio. "I was so weirded
out about it, obviously... I couldn't say anything to my girlfriend at
the time. I was totally in this world of my own and didn't connect
much with the outside world, so that's half why we broke up."

So after such a horrific experience, what possessed Teller to

photograph himself, decades later, lying naked and vulnerable on
top of a donkey?
The answer begins in Frankfurt in 2013, when he was struck by a
flashback of the incident while working on a performance piece with
the German artist Anne Imhof. Teller's role was to lead a donkey
from outside the Portikus gallery into the white exhibition space and
tie the animal up, a task that not only scared him (he was worried
he might get kicked) but also resurfaced memories of what
happened in Turkey.

'Truly, deeply personal'

A few years later, Teller sourced his own donkey and shot the cover
image in his studio, a large purpose-built space in West London. "I
said, 'I need a donkey. I want to have a donkey here. And I want to
be naked on the donkey. And I want to, somehow, write that story,'"
he explained.

"You have good experiences, bad experiences, funny experiences.

Life is full of complexity and I wanted to show that.

When it came to choosing the book's cover, Teller noted that he

could have used one of his more familiar pictures. He's shot iconic
photos of Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham and Björk, to name a few --
stars that "would have sold more copies." But it had to be this
photograph, he said, because the project is "truly, deeply personal."

The book also features images and words from Teller's closest
collaborators, including the actor Charlotte Rampling, who Teller
has photographed numerous times. In one shot, taken in the
courtyard of his studio, the actor sits powerful and poised holding a
beautiful fox. A few pages later she is seen again -- this time on her
hands and knees as she eats or drinks from the same white plate
as the fox. The absurdity of the scene is a common trope for Teller,
whose sense of humor is often of the twisted variety.

Teller's photos may be a little challenging to some -- there's lots of

nudity, phallic shapes and shots of slugs and frogs scattered
throughout the book's pages. His images often force viewers to
question what is sexy, humorous or sad.

He's also not one for proverbial pedestals. A photo of Kim

Kardashian West  shows her crawling in the dirt in thigh-high
stockings, boots, underwear and a fur coat with her bottom sticking
up in the air. Photos of a completely naked Kristen McMenamy,
meanwhile, reveal the model's most intimate body parts.

But Teller rejects the idea that he is demanding of his subjects;

these scenes come about quite naturally, he said, adding that he
never asks anyone to do anything he considers inappropriate. "I
don't do anything out of spite or where they don't know what I'm
doing," he said. "It's always clear what I'm after, I guess."

So what was he after with the Kim Kardashian photo? "I was
entirely interested in her bum, and what that whole thing is," he said
plainly.