Smells like Saskia de Brauw.
Photographs by Juergen Teller
Sittings editor: Jerry Stafford
Fragrance blended by Daniela Andrier
Smells like Saskia de Brauw.
‘I’ve sat opposite people on trains while they’ve been looking at pictures of me in a magazine. They don’t recognise me; they never make the association between the pictures and a person who might sit opposite them on trains, or live next door to them.’
‘I’d never worked with Juergen before and was a little nervous about what he was going to do. But I realised that he sees poetry in so much of the world, whether that’s a pebble or a wound on a knee or a scratch on a belly. He was so much more subtle as a person than I thought he might be. It was rather touching.’
I’m often asked the question: ‘What is beauty for you?’
But I don’t really think in those terms. I just find a lot of things are beautiful when you open your mind. Making these pictures really made me think – not so much about beauty or models, but how was I going to shoot them, and where, and how will they come out. Stuff like that. It’s why I’m often quite nervous before a shoot.
The night before I was shooting Liya in Paris, I found myself having a really odd dream. And I’m not sure where this came from. It clearly had something to do with the fact that I’d photographed a plastic surgeon in June. I was very dubious about that whole scene, and I certainly feel it is completely unnecessary for me to even consider anything like that. But this plastic surgeon really intrigued me – a lot of what he was saying made sense, he seemed very proficient – and I liked him.
He also said he knows my work well. Since most fashion photographers’ pictures are so heavily airbrushed, he uses mine as a reference for his own work. That certainly perplexed me.
Anyway, that night, I had this dream in which I had to photograph an older lady instead of Liya. ‘You can’t photograph me yet, though,’ said the lady, ‘We have to go to my plastic surgeon first.’
All of sudden, I found myself at the plastic surgery with these two muscular guys in all white, violently taking me, instead of the lady, down to the chair. I was shouting, ‘No, you’ve got the wrong person, I totally don’t want any of that. I’m fine, I’m happy with myself.’
Then they gave me something and I was out cold.
When I woke up and looked in the mirror, it was the worst sight you could possibly imagine; it didn’t look like me anymore. My face was all stretched and one of my ears was hanging right down. ‘Guys!’ I started shouting, ‘What the hell has happened here?’
‘Oh, I’m really sorry,’ replied one of them. ‘That was a bit of a mistake…’
I suddenly woke up and found myself sweating in bed. Then I had to take the photographs of Liya.
Juergen Teller, September 2014