Top 71 Quotes & Sayings by Juergen Teller

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

One day, I'll be photographing Kate Moss in Paris, then I'll be on Stephanie Seymour's ranch with her hundred horses wondering what exactly it is I'm doing there.

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.

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 think it's really important to not be afraid of failure and to push yourself to try things and jump in the cold water.

Family is a major part of my life.

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.

Quite frankly, if I didn't enjoy the fashion industry, then I wouldn't continue to do it.

I wasn't aware it could make me rich or famous. I just wanted to take pictures.

I had no visual imagination as a child. I liked playing football. That was it.

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.

I want adventure in my life. I want to do things I haven't done before. These Hollywood people are so careful of their image and looking right, but there's a wildness when I come into the photographs. I just want to wade through rivers, climb mountains.

A few brands have asked me to design shorts for them. I'm not sure about that. I don't want to have them as a mass product, and suddenly everybody is walking around in them.

When you have your own kid, it suddenly makes you more aware of how your parents treated you and educated you. Your relationships with your partner, your uncles, your mother all change; you're more conscious of where you came from, of where your roots are. I find that very interesting.

I just want to do everything as good as I possibly can.

I think my strength is to act instinctively, really quickly, on what I believe, what I see in this person. A proper portrait. I wouldn't dream of doing something inappropriate for that person. I guess I make the person comfortable around me.

For me, cinema is very important. I grew up with television; then, as a teenager, you discover cinema.

I would be lost without my family.

I go, wherever there is my interest, where my heart and feeling take me.

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.

My father and one of my grandfathers died very early, and female figures have been an influential part of my life.

I'm interested in the person I photograph. The world is so beautiful as it is; there's so much going on, which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me.

I have a Mercedes. I wear a Rolex watch. I have no problem with the selling of things.

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

Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy - which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man.

I don't care about fashion at all.

You have a negative, and you can have an influence whether you want to have it more contrasty or less contrasty; you can pre-flash the photo paper. You can make it warmer or colder, lighter, darker. This is all a way of manipulating the image in a normal way, not changing the pixels.

Back in 2000, I didn't have a mobile phone.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

I never work with a screen. Other photographers have this black thing around, and they go back and look at it. I'd rather spend the time with the subject, photographing or discussing or talking, than staring at this thing. I'd rather look at what's going on.

When I became a father, all that stuff rose up again from the back of my mind. I suddenly realised how uninvolved my father had been in my life.

I take it very seriously, the photographic craft.

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

My father never really encouraged me or even took an interest after I walked away from the family business. No one did except my mother and my grandfather. To be truthful, I cannot remember one meaningful conversation I had with my father.

It was really inspiring to be in West London in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Mark Lebon's Crunch Studios, where I met people like Ray Petri, Neneh Cherry, Judy Blame, Nick and Barry Kamen, Zoe Bedeaux, and Venetia Scott.

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.

I don't really like being controlled by anyone.

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 am someone who takes pleasure in exploring the full scale of the medium photography. I am a photographer.

I cycle whenever possible around London. But I travel first class when I need to fly.

I always work with two cameras. Its kind of like I'm hypnotizing the subject with the flashing. It's a bombardment of action, flashes, and I think it helps them to ease into the process.

I like physical exercise. I cycle, run, and play tennis and football with my son.

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.

I don't try to be original; I just always want to do something that excites me.

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

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.

It's important to spend time with your work. That's when you see it, when you have a feeling.

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 just really like women, and I like men, and I like children, and I like eating, and I like doing everything.

What's the point of shorts if they're not short?

I never really think of anyone as models, even the models.

I think my moral ground is very much intact.

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

I don't understand longer shorts. I don't think they look good on anyone.

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

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

I don't care what other people think. I hate conforming, that you have to wear this to a business meeting or that to a dinner. I've never worked that way.

I think the range of my life shows in my work.

In Bavaria, many homes have a cosy room which is all wood and is filled with special things. My grandfather had such a room, and he made the panels on the walls himself; each one told a story.