Juergen Teller’s Surprising Take on Robert Mapplethorpe
Charlotte Jansen, Artsy
November 2016
On Sunday evening, Juergen Teller was watching Planet Earth II on TV with his son, and the London-based photographer found himself unusually affected by it. Snakes slithering through the sand to eat eggs and a female leopard being “raped by a male leopard” suddenly left him quivering. “My son said to me, ‘Dad, you’re so easily scared! Don’t be such a wimp,’ ” Teller recalls as he sits opposite me, smoking a cigarette, still visibly shaken by the experience. This particular sensitivity to the cruelty of nature he attributes to his profound involvement over the past year with the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, after Alison Jacques, a longtime dealer of Mapplethorpe’s work in London, invited him to curate an exhibition for her gallery on Berners Street. The resulting show, “Teller on Mapplethorpe,” opens today. […]