Magnificent Jewels by Juergen Teller and Marian Gerard Phillips de Pury & Company, Geneva 17 May 2005 192 pages Softcover book (fine condition) presented in a clamshell cardboard box (fair condition) Rare auction catalogue Excerpt from The Guardian Newspaper Sat 14 May 2005 ...Invited by the auction house, Phillips de Pury & Company, to do a shoot for the catalogue of its upcoming jewellery auction, Teller wanted to offset the ostentation of the jewels with a somewhat more prosaic selection of models: his daughter Lola, seven, his son Ed, 11 weeks, his mother Irene ("Let's just leave it at 'mother' "), and assorted family friends and godparents. "When I got the commission," says Teller, "I thought, why put jewellery on 18-year-old models who would never wear them? Why not put it on my mother, who would love to? That, to me, seemed much more logical." And so, instead of the usual loving photos of overly large jewels resting on plump, velvet pillows, diamond cuffs are cinched around the chubby elbow of Teller's son clad in a Motorhead rompersuit, while Mrs Teller Snr displays globular pearls with her head at an impressively haughty angle. "Normally, whenever I try to photograph my mother, she is extremely impatient and will only stand for a minute and insists on knowing exactly what I'm doing. But she was very good for this one - probably because she got paid." Lola and Ed, he insists, were the best models. These photographs exemplify Teller's style nicely: the people - resolutely normal in appearance - are baldly photographed straight-on, their faces staring nonplussed at the viewer. But, Teller argues, his photos can rarely be described as "realistic": "I often photograph something as if the subject matter was realistic, but it is actually a fantasy." After all, he says, his daughter does not usually lounge around in gems. It is the antithesis of the style of many other photographers of celebrities today, such as David LaChapelle, say, or Mario Testino, who heavily gloss and idealise their subjects to an almost parodic extent. It is this ability to make fantasy appear to be a reality that probably attracts Teller's following in the fashion and entertainment worlds - industries that rely on the presentation and selling of fantasy as, if not actuality, then at least a possibility. In his long-running collaboration with Marc Jacobs, Teller's photographs of distinctly unglamourised models (in the current campaign, Teller himself dresses like a geeky suburban husband, replete with bad hairpiece) stand out strongly from the usual fashion advertisements, which, with their models' shiny, attenuated legs and voluminous hairstyles, seem to have hardly moved on since the 1980s. Yes, Teller's is a style that relies heavily on irony, but it's one intended to gives designer clothes a cooler credibility than throwbacks to the Dynasty era. This was precisely what Simone de Pury was looking for when he approached Teller in the first place. "Our usual jewellery clients will," de Pury says, with not a small amount of anticipatory glee, "perhaps be a little astonished." But for Teller, his photographs have a simple origin: "It's what's in my mind. It's what I dream." #rarefashionbook #juergenteller #simondepury #contemporaryphotobook