For the subset of the internet that lives to dissect fashion and celebrity, W Magazine’s annual Performance Issue, released online Wednesday, has become the locus of the so-bad-it’s-good debate.
A multicover compendium of the year’s award season favorites captured offhandedly in the clothes by Loewe, Bottega Veneta and other keepers of the avant-garde fashion flame, it is not just a record of some of the biggest names in entertainment, but an opportunity to discourse on the legendary German photographer Juergen Teller’s unorthodox, loose and seemingly ersatz photographs, which this year include Natalie Portman, Margot Robbie, Jodie Foster, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore and eight others, chosen by the magazine’s editor-at-large, Lynn Hirschberg.
The jokes and commentary began pouring in on social media on Wednesday morning. “Another year, another round of Juergen Teller for W Best Performances portfolio discourse,” bemoaned one X user, a self-proclaimed defender of Teller. Another X commenter shared a GIF of Michael Jackson peacefully pushing down a gun and wrote: “Another year of begging Juergen Teller to put his camera down.”
The last time Teller shot the covers, in 2021, magazines published think pieces and rounded up the criticisms, but this year’s conversation seemed generally pro-Teller. “This is my genuine reaction every time he takes a photo of a celebrity looking like they just sneezed while sitting on a trash heap,” said a Teller apologist, adding a GIF of Carrie Bradshaw squealing at the Eiffel Tower. “I know y’all are gonna be hating on this on Twitter all day but this spread is Juergen at its best lol,” Vogue writer José Criales-Unzueta wrote on his Instagram stories.
When most celebrity magazine covers barely register, why do Teller’s pop? “They’re really loud and they’re really different,” says W Magazine’s editor Sara Moonves. “Juergen almost makes a mini-movie while we’re doing this, and it sparks a lot of thought in people the way that every great movie does. It creates a performance.”
Contemporary magazine covers and Instagram have trained us to gaze upon celebrities as photoshopped, shapewear-smoothed soft serve. But Teller’s photographs — he shot the magazine’s portfolios in 2020 and 2021, and returns this year after a two-year hiatus — are a mischievous jab at the Hollywood machine, or an affront to the sacred pact of glamour.
Teller, who is 59 and often wears small and colorful jogging shorts to fashion shows in Europe, came of age as a photographer in the 1990s. His crisply bizarre images, especially campaigns for Marc Jacobs and images of Kate Moss, made him a bona fide star in the 21st century.
“He’s been taking images like this for the last 30 years,” says Antwaun Sargent, a director at Gagosian Gallery who has written extensively on the overlap between fashion and fine-art photography. What makes them stand out now is their defiance of contemporary photography standards or expectations, he says. “The history of photography is the history of technology, and Juergen goes against that current.” We all have the tools to make “perfect” images — Photoshop, Facetune, filters, etc. — so when someone chooses to make an imperfect image, “it allows a real opportunity to question who we are in relation to the self in the present world,” Sargent says. “It allows a consideration of the truth.”
Teller regularly shoots ad campaigns for brands such as Loewe and Saint Laurent, but none start conversations like his W Magazine shoots — likely because of their star power. Here is sexiest man alive emeritus George Clooney, in a polo and jeans, clutching two children’s bicycles in 2021. Here is Laura Dern in 2020 — posing like your mom would for a post-fancy dinner candid in the parking lot?
Those 2021 photographs, in particular, were a hit, Sargent says: “They made [magazine] images matter again.”
Teller appears to have given this year’s pictures a few more beats — “Barbie” star Robbie wears a Bottega Veneta dress festooned with pompoms in front of a few dozen wig stands (a doll among dolls!). Portman, who plays a leech-like method actress in “May December,” poses in a tacky tourist gift shop. Wild guy Nicolas Cage sprawls on a leopard sofa in a leopard shirt. As for some of the others — Greta Lee standing up in the front seat of a sightseeing sports car, Charles Melton clutching a head of broccoli — who knows? (“Do you know how good looking you have to be for Juergen Teller not to be able to make you look bad ?!!” an X user joked of Melton’s oddball prop portraits.)
“Let’s shoot on the most glamorous street in Los Angeles!” Moonves recalls Teller and Dovile Drizyte, Teller’s wife and creative partner, telling her, giggling. What they had in mind was Hollywood Boulevard: “It’s so fun, it’s so vibrant and it has this amazing energy to it.”
The images are the doomscrolling age’s answer to Vanity Fair’s once venerable Hollywood Issue, with its resplendent (and digitally manipulated) trifold of A-list actors in glittering gowns and tailcoats, heaped on each other’s laps and snapped in chiaroscuro by Annie Leibovitz. Instead, these embody our ambivalent relationship to fame, as we often demand that celebrities look perfect, but when they do look perfect, we get suspicious or even angry. Teller’s style is an embrace of that tension: Is it really so naughty to look a little silly, have a little fun?
The W Magazine photos’ tossed-off aesthetic is not, as these things sometimes are, the result of painstaking pretense; Riz Ahmed, who was captured for the 2021 issue leaning against a tree, said the “shoot was the fastest of my life. 20 seconds, two clicks.”
After that, users on X, formerly known as Twitter, began sharing unflattering photographs of celebrities — Hillary Clinton touring a housing project, Sad Keanu Reeves — with the caption “Photographed by Juergen Teller,” which earned a page on KnowYourMeme.
Vulture rounded up the worst images. Paper Magazine collected the memes. Elephant Magazine, an art magazine, accused Teller of missing the irony that “despite his antagonism towards” celebrity photographers, he now finds themselves among their ranks.
Moonves says she appreciated Ahmed’s comments because “it was real and it was honest. We weren’t angry that he did that because we weren’t trying to hide the fact that Juergen sets up a shot and he knows when he has the picture,” she says. “I feel total confidence in him, and the talent does too.”
Now that smartphones have made all of us into photographers, and portrait artists at that, it’s easy to believe that a photograph’s purpose is to make the subject look good in a way that is universally agreed upon, accessible. When someone violates or plays with that contract between photographer and subject, by making that person look silly, or unguarded, or overly familiar, it’s uncomfortable, which may be why Teller’s photographs are so contentious.
For Moonves, it’s simpler: “I love that people are having fun and smiling. God, we need that right now.”
