The master

In the summer of 2005 Steidl published a small booklet of Juergen Teller’s work, titled ‘The Master’. It offered a characteristic examination of his own world and persona as a photographer, a mixture of fashion and commissioned works, alongside self-portraits, family photographs and scenes from his Bavarian home. The title and starting point for the book were portraits of two of his heroes, the photographers William Eggleston and Nobuyoshi Araki. The book quickly went out of print and a second edition of the ‘The Master’ will now be printed alongside ‘The Master II’, marking the beginning of a series of booklets that will culminate in a slip-cased edition of all ten or more at some point in the future. ‘The Master II’ comprises his recent body of work ‘Ukraine’ in which he chose to employ the city of Kiev as the setting for a fashion shoot, mixing fashion, still-lives of the city, and portraits of ordinary people as a way of representing his own fantasy of a country marked by a brash youthful energy and an obsession with capitalism. Juergen Teller, born in Erlangen, Germany in 1964, studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich. His work has been published in influential publications such as W Magazine, iD and Purple and has been the subject of solo exhibitions including the Photographer’s Gallery in London, the Kunsthalle Wien and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. Teller has produced numerous monographs with Steidl including Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998–2009 and Zimmerman.