Juergen Teller's new book is both an uncompromising journal and a poignant engagement with the uncharted world that lies behind the outward glamour of the fashion industry. Taken over the period of a year in the doorway of the photographer's London studio, these portraits of models, most of whorm are unknown, are at profoundly moving and disquieting.
In Go-Sees, Teller has pushed his exploration of the relationship between the photographer and his subjects into new territory. The portraits constitute, on one level, a documentary record of the "Go-Sees" : a term used to describe an aspiring model and her vetting by a photographer. On another level, they register the photographer's unavoidable complicity in a process that reduces the model's material existence to an idealised abstraction. It is precisely here, Teller suggests, in the critical space between the concrete and the abstract, that our fantasies take shape and begin to breathe.
