Juergen Teller: Good morning.

Jonathan Wingfield: How’s your back, Juergen? Is it still hurting?

Juergen: A little better, I had acupuncture yesterday. I am pretty sure it’s from shooting all these portraits for System.

Jonathan: Does that mean you’re going to sue us?

Dovile Drizyte: [Laughs] That’s exactly what I was about to say; we should call our lawyer!

Juergen: There’s a bad pain all around my shoulder. Because when I’m shooting someone as they appear through the iPad screen I’m crouching down the whole time, looking into the screen, trying to figure out what the light is like in their house, working out how to shoot from our side, in the studio, and if we need props, and leaning down to shoot. And while Dovile engages the person by talking to them, I’m always in this weird crouching position holding the camera. It’s not like shooting normally. But she has massaged it all around the shoulder and it’s feeling better.

Jonathan: You mentioned the other day that you were enjoying the routine of getting up early each morning and going to the studio. Is routine important to you in general?

Juergen: Very important. It’s good to have some kind of routine and structure in your life. For me, it started when I had my first child, Lola; you automatically adopt a routine, whether you want it or not. Before that, you sleep until 11 in the morning and things don’t matter.

Dovile: I’d call it discipline. We wanted to maintain some kind of discipline in these times of isolation, and not just say, ‘Alright, let’s pretend this is a long holiday.’ So this routine-slash-discipline helped us to keep the creative thing going, to achieve a lot of fun things, and take up projects like this one you guys gave us.

Jonathan: The project is anchored in the format of shooting each person on a Zoom video call on your iPad, but it’s surprising how varied the results look.

Juergen: I was nervous about how I would achieve different kinds of pictures for each person, because technically I am not very equipped. That was the biggest problem. We’ve been totally self-isolating the whole time, and the only conversations we’ve had have been with our parents via FaceTime or the kids. We haven’t really been communicating with many people, and then suddenly we were facing all these creative people… how many people did we do?

Dovile: I think it was 37.

Juergen: Suddenly you’re talking to so many different people every day, which was super fantastic, but also intense and psychologically draining, as much as physically taking the pictures themselves. Up until then, it had just been Dovile and me talking.

Dovile: We said, ‘Let’s do this, because we’ll have a chance to see people in all these different places and in different moods.’ Everyone was really positive or reflective, displaying different emotions, so it has turned out to be a psychological experiment.

Juergen: It’s interesting for me because most of the time when I photograph celebrities they’ll have their press officer there with them, their ‘people’. Over the past 20 years, it’s become so normal for agents or press officers to say, ‘You can’t photograph there’ or ‘Can I have a look at what you’re shooting on your screen?’ Suddenly, because everyone is isolated, we were free of all that, which was refreshing. Everyone was just happy to talk, and free to show us into their lives, via Zoom: ‘Here is my garden, here is where I play golf, here is my living room.’ And then Dovile came up with the idea that we could build things around the screen, on our side.

Dovile: Like a mise-en-scène. Depending on who was on screen, and then the light and colour of the room where they were, we would place something around
the screen to add an extra layer. Some of those pictures came out like still lifes.

Thomas Lenthal: I was particularly interested in this notion of there being two sides to what you do: on one side, you stage things and create your reality, and then on the other side you embrace reality as it happens in front of you, and you react to it, which is usually incredibly personal, even almost child-like. I don’t know any other photographer who would adopt these two ways of going about reality.

Dovile: Something happened recently that made me think about this exact thing. I decided to film Juergen once in a while using an old-school camcorder, just to have a bit of footage. But then he said, ‘Why are you doing it on that old thing? You have your iPhone.’ It made me think that Juergen is one of the only ones who remains truly ‘current’, not necessarily ‘modern’, but he is very in tune with things that are happening right now around him. I think he accepted this idea of ‘staging’, of the mise-en-scène, very quickly because it’s a way to adapt to this current situation and make the people who appeared on the iPad screen seem enhanced by
whatever is around them.

Juergen: There were different ways to react to the people and how they presented themselves. For example, the Scottish fashion designer, Charles Jeffrey, just came prepared with this wonderful make-up; it was incredible. He didn’t need anything adding from our side of the screen. After that, I was standing in front of the black screen, waiting for Jerry Stafford to appear, thinking to myself, ‘How on earth am I going to photograph him?’ And then he suddenly appeared on screen and he had already figured it all out! Sitting in his black underwear, on the chair, like Christine Keeler. It was fantastic, totally genius! It was all going well. And then Silvia Fendi appeared, sitting in an office, where the light wasn’t good. So I needed to react super quickly, adapt to all these different situations. That’s why I am always adding something from my current life into it, and that’s where all these fruit and vegetables come from.

Dovile: We’d been shopping, our weekly routine.

Juergen: Before lockdown, we would just go out to eat in a restaurant, then go to Paris to work or whatever, so the fridge is always empty. But now we are
working a lot in the studio doing still lifes, and I have all this asparagus and these blood oranges…

Dovile: Nice vegetables and fruit, very photogenic.

Juergen: The fridge is always full. This is my life right now. So that comes into the pictures. I was looking at the colours of the fruit and vegetables and thinking, ‘This is like Missoni colours, and the structure of the fruit is almost like Missoni knitwear.’ So that’s the thing for making a lovely picture of Angela Missoni. And Silvia Fendi was in Rome, so I was thinking, blood oranges come from Italy and I have some, somehow that looks pretty, that’s the photo. You have to be sensitive to each person, and hopefully everybody sees these pictures with a smile on their face, especially at a time like this when everybody’s still in isolation.

Thomas: Your whole body of work is like a personal visual diary of your life.

Juergen: Yes. I recently did an exhibition with Araki and he asked me to go back to my mother’s house and take all the memorabilia. Stuff like these wooden bridges for cellos – making those was my family’s business – and then I found this wooden elephant that my dad had carved, and a little Smurf toy from when I was a child. So I brought all these things back to the studio. But with all that stuff, plus all the fruit and vegetables we had, it was becoming a real mess; all these things lying around. Then we thought somehow some of these things could be incorporated. So, Tim Blanks was wearing this brilliant orange Hawaiian shirt – you know, he always has these ridiculous shirts which no one else would get away with – and Dovile got the papaya.

Dovile: The papaya was just waiting for Tim!

Juergen: And then of course, Rick Owens. I have been to his place in Paris, and it is all concrete and black marble, and all very… Rick Owens! I also have a concrete studio building, and a roman plinth, which is actually an ashtray, so I placed Rick on top of that and it’s a lovely fit for him. Then Gwendoline the actress is more playful and theatrical. Then I heard that Tommy Hilfiger was in Mustique, so we quickly printed out some sunsets to use as a backdrop for him and his palm trees. And, of course, you Thomas. Your name Lenthal sounds like lentil, so we opened a bag of lentils onto the screen when you called. I mean, it’s not like I’d have normally gone to Thomas’s house with a bag of fucking lentils hoping to take a portrait. That would have been totally stupid. But I felt like I was able to play in these pictures and I think that is really important. I have to say, it was incredibly exhausting and a lot of fun. I enjoyed it and I wanted to thank you very, very much for giving me this adventure, which I have never done before.

Dovile: We would like to also thank all of the participants because I think for some very public people it takes real courage to accept this, because they don’t know what is in front of them, they didn’t see what we were building around them.

Jonathan: I have a question. Each of your subjects appeared on your iPad screen, and you then photographed this screen using an iPhone. And although these pictures are initially destined to be published in our print magazine, we all know that a lot of this work will ultimately be seen and shared by people seeing it on their phones, via Instagram or whatever. So I was curious to know, to what extent do you care if your work looks good on a phone screen, or does that not cross your mind?

Juergen: That is an interesting thing to consider, but I only think about whether the work is good or not. I mean, I don’t look at Instagram any more. I used to, and I have to say that I got a bit obsessed by it…

*Dovile: Juergen got totally addicted to Instagram.

Juergen: It was so depressing looking at that stuff, so I stopped. The only good thing I got out of it – before the lockdown and while football was still happening – was that I heard about the football transfers earlier than the newspapers. That was the only positive thing I could get out of Instagram! Sometimes Dovile shows me something on Instagram and I look at it and think, ‘Oh my God, this image looks quite interesting.’ But then I see that same image in a magazine and it is an utter fucking failure and disappointing. When it gets published, it falls flat. That little screen helps make everything look interesting; it makes everything feel OK.

Thomas: I have a question in relation to what Dovile was saying about Juergen embracing the reality of now. It’s about the amount of images you currently produce, and have for a while now. It sort of echoes the huge amount of imagery currently being produced around the world, literally billions and billions of images. Juergen, I remember you saying in an interview more than 20 years ago that photographers should only put out 5 or 10 pictures a year. Then, little by little, you have come to terms with this notion that the now is about ‘too much’. You have embraced this and decided to do something with the ‘too much’ instead of going against it.

Juergen: Yeah, and this lockdown freed me up to do a whole series of still lifes and pictures of Dovile and other things, and I just stopped thinking or caring
what anyone else would think. It was an intense feeling of happiness: playful pictures, not even having to leave the house to do them. It was partly to do with the iPhone, because you can just take pictures and pictures and pictures. In the old days, you had to take a camera and put a film in and develop it and it all cost money. Now you can edit it and work on it and really enjoy this act of photographing.

Dovile: I saw Juergen being totally absorbed by creativity. He became this carefree artist who just did things that gave him pleasure, and he got these fantastic pictures.

Juergen: For me, it was important to do something new as a portrait and not some 1960s-looking, Irving Penn-like, black-and-white, airbrushed picture with a fake Hasselblad border in order to please the subject’s vanity and subsequently make money. If I had been between a Saint Laurent shoot, caring about how to shoot the handbags, and then another shoot the following week, I would have approached these pictures in a different way, not in that free manner, for sure. It’s been so quiet, just us, how it should be, thinking about funny things and then stopping for lunch, chopping vegetables and eating well.

Thomas: Some people are acknowledging that this confinement situation has been a very positive experience, almost like they were learning to live again.

Juergen: I even have to say that at the beginning of lockdown, for four or five weeks, we hardly drank alcohol at all. We were so healthy – but then we got a bit bored!