It is no hard task to find Juergen Teller’s studio. On a west London road, among rows of beige two-up, two-down terraced houses, his 60-metre deep plot stands in pale concrete glory. An assistant opens the door to a gaping, garage-looking space where, in 2016, Teller posed naked on a donkey to celebrate the build’s completion (the following year, his studio was nominated for the Stirling Prize and won the Riba London Building of the Year award). I wind up to the second floor to sit and wait for the 60-year-old and his creative collaborator and wife of three years, Dovile Drizyte, 41, surrounded by relics of Teller’s nearly four-decade career. Contact sheets date back to 1997, there are stacks of Document Journals and Pop magazines, and great coffee-table books sit full of his famous fashion commercial work, from Barney’s to countless handbag brands.
When the pair arrive it starts to rain. Teller, not famous for his immediate warmth, groans. Sporting his signature fluro-pink shorts and Asics trainers, he starts photographing the wet window and now budding deciduous trees in the central courtyard below. ‘It’s nice,’ he says, wafting his iPhone screen at Drizyte. This is Teller in action. He is not one for faffing around and his results can look — well, like they have been taken quickly on his iPhone, even if subjects are the celebrity elite. When he shot Riz Ahmed by a tree for W Magazine’s annual awards season portfolio in 2021, the actor tweeted it ‘was the fastest of my life. 20 seconds, two clicks’. After the 2024 iteration of the W issue — see, Natalie Portman wearing a Dior gown in a tourist shop — debate raged again. People call him lazy, others idolise his wit.
