Go-Sees: Girls Knocking on My Door, Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller's new book te both an uncempromising journal and a poignant engagement with the uncharted wortd that tee behind the outward glamour of the fashion industry. Teken over the period of a year in the doorway of the photographer's London studio, these portraits of models, most of whom are unknown, are at once 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-see": 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 preciaely here, Teller suggests, in the critical space between the concrete and the abstract, that our fantasies take shape and begin to breathe.

Te studio of photographer Juergen Teller, best known for his fashion pictures, is located in a tiny street in West London. And it is the front door of his studio that somehow seems to play the leading role in this book. During one year, from May 1998 to May 1999, Teller was visited by hundreds of girls, sent to him by their agencies for a casting shoot. The origin of this new book was a deceptively simple idea that immediately struck Teller. Why not photograph all of his young female visitors and turn the result into a convincing conceptual piece of art photography? The result is striking, sometimes funny, and sometimes thoughtful as it makes us question the fashion industry and the world of models. We encounter girls, mostly around the age of seventeen or eighteen, presenting themselves to the photographer in the hopes of a great career. Sometimes they come alone, sometimes in groups, sometimes accompanied by their parents. Captured in the different lights of the changing seasons, but always at the entrance of Teller's studio, these portraits seem to melt into one single portrait -- that of the one and only model, whatever she might look like.