Juergen Teller

I like people with conviction, who are in control of themselves. I'm not interested in working with a designer who hires a creative director.

I try and photograph people as they are. I do not want to hide anything. I want to bring across a personality, a humanity. It is not a case of model A or model B against a white background. I am interested in the person.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

My childhood was very beautiful in some ways and very disturbing in others.

I don't really like being controlled by anyone.

I'm not interested in running around from one shoot to another.

There was a stage in my career when I started to have problems with the vanity aspect of the subject. I got frustrated and bored with it. Then I thought, actually, how does it feel to be photographed? That's when I started to photograph myself. That was an incredibly important moment, and it opened up my work tremendously.

You can't get away from fashion. The whole beauty thing is everywhere. It's just really weird.

I don't care about fashion at all.

I couldn't identify with the images in 'Elle' or 'Vogue' or 'Harper's Bazaar.' Nobody in the world we're walking around in actually looks like that.

When you're a kid, what you learn in school about being German has a sort of heaviness about it, and you have a sort of guilt with you.

If I do a portrait, I know what they can take. If somebody's a sweet, shy person, the photographs will be sweet and shy. Of course, you ask people to do something which they might not have done before, but that's the journey, the fun element.

I think my moral ground is very much intact.

I would never ask somebody to do something where I felt that it's not right or it puts someone in an uncomfortable position.

When I was a child, I always went to my grandmother's house in Nuremberg for Christmas. My uncle would leave the room, saying he needed the toilet, and then he would reappear dressed as Santa Claus. I was really scared - I'd have to go and hide behind an armchair.

I'm often in Venice in November and December, when it's foggy and wintry, and the decorations in the shops and the lights in the churches make the place feel both Christmassy and melancholic.

I often photograph something as if the subject matter was realistic, but it is actually a fantasy.

Normally, whenever I try to photograph my mother, she is extremely impatient and will only stand for a minute and insists on knowing exactly what I'm doing.

Nudity is no big deal as a German. It's all rather normal and boring.

I like friendship.

For my 50th birthday, my cousin Helmut gave me the most profound, beautiful, and striking present. He made books out of my dad's slide photographs, which were stored and forgotten. Looking at those books made me cry.