Unretouched: Juergen Teller, Edward Enninful, and The 90s Revisited
Written by Massimo Casagrande
“England really welcomed me, in Germany you had to climb up the ladder, have
certificates, be an assistant. In England it didn’t matter. You showed your work and
they gave you a chance.”
The 90s were messy, honest, and gloriously unfiltered. A decade where we learned
who we were through magazines, the music scene, grainy photos, and the chaos of
culture itself. So when Juergen Teller and Edward Enninful took the stage at Petit
Palais during Art Basel Paris to revisit that era, it didn’t feel nostalgic; it felt like a
reminder of when things were raw, imperfect, and alive.
Teller began the conversation by recalling his arrival in London from a small German
village, barely speaking English, and how his story started out not with fashion, but
record sleeves.
Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U became his entry point, and he had been
welcomed by the London creative circle that defined the decade: Judy Blame, Zoe
Bedeaux, and Ray Petri. They were the creative energy that moved between
photography, styling, and sound. “They let me be part of it,” he said. “That warmth
meant something,” remembering the openness of that scene.
Teller says he wasn’t grunge. He was an observer, part of the scene yet always
outside of it, photographing it as it lived. As he spoke, images of the 90s flashed on
the screen: a young Chloë Sevigny, Harmony Korine, a pink Kate Moss, Kurt Cobain
and Courtney Love, and an iconic Kristen McMenamy naked for Versace. A
contradiction to his words. They were a reminder that his refusal to belong helped
define the look of that decade.
Enninful smiled, reminding him, “You said you were an outsider, and I said you were
an outsider but also the ultimate insider, because everybody wanted to work with
you.”
“Yeah, I guess. I mostly said no,” Teller replied, “Because, you know how it was, you
had to think, what do you want to do? And when you're young, it takes a long time to
think about what you want to do. I didn't want to churn out the work.”
It was a time of experimentation before everything became categorised or turned into
a commodity. “You went to record stores and studied sleeves; magazines were few,
so you had to really look,” he recalled. “Things were slower, and they could develop
in time. You had to survive doing what you believed in.”
Teller’s reflections carried a quiet pride in process, in the craftsmanship of
photography itself. He described learning light, film, and printing as a kind of
apprenticeship in patience. What struck me most was his insistence on time, and
how creativity once relied on slowness, and how that rhythm has disappeared. “You
need time to play,” he said. “You need time to fail and learn from your mistakes. It’s
good to go to a bad movie, because you learn how bad it is.” That idea of learning
through failure hung in the air like a quiet protest against today’s culture of
optimisation, a reminder that everything was already there, if only we could see it.
That sense of restraint, and of knowing when not to belong, defined much of his
journey. When American Vogue flew him over on Concorde, he quickly realised how
narrow the system could be. “You’re suddenly in New York and you do not
photograph black and white, it has to be colour,” he said. “I got bored by it. So
instead of me flying over the ocean, I thought, why don’t I be in the studio and turn
those things upside down and let them come to me.”
What followed was Go-Sees, his year-long conceptual project that blurred
documentary, portraiture, and fashion. “I was sure it was good,” he said.
“Conceptually interesting, even politically. The same power it had when I started
working with Helmut Lang.”
That partnership, built in 1993, with Helmut Lang redefined visual language: raw,
minimal, intimate. He shot what was already there: models arriving, waiting, leaving.
No fantasy, just reality reframed. Helmut was part of his “German connection”, a
small, tight-knit circle that included Ellen von Unwerth, Karl Lagerfeld, and a few
others who spoke the same language, literally and visually. “We understood each
other,” he recalled. “We were the few who could talk German to each other, everyone
else was English or French.”
When Enninful asked what he now looks for in a subject, Teller’s reply was simple:
“Everything which touches my heart, which comes from life experience. Walking
through the forest with my mother, photographing a cookbook, people who touched
my heart and my intellect.”
It’s the same instinct that led him to Auschwitz, a project he described as a
responsibility, “It took me half a year to recover,” he admitted.
But Teller’s sharpness never dulled when asked about today’s art-fashion circuit,
“They’re desperately eating each other up, bulging out the arm of everything is like
an overdose of this shit.”
For someone known for raw honesty, Teller was remarkably restrained, having said
“fuck” only four times throughout the whole conversation, yes, I kept tabs, politely
rotating through all its conjugations: “fuck,” “fucked,” and “fucking.” That’s fucking (if I
might add) polite, by 90s standards.
He’s not cynical, just precise. His refusal to conform remains almost punk. “I want my
work to be alive,” he said. “Not trapped in a white cube.”
Contracts? They were never part of the plan. “Those young photographers in the
90s, they all swooped to New York and got contracts. You’re handcuffed and you’re
fucked.” He’s worked with Marc Jacobs, Phoebe Philo, Vivienne Westwood, JW
Anderson, Loewe, Dior, and yet, “I never would say I want to have a contract and
have to be doing this. I say yes or I say no.”
That independence, Enninful notes, is rare. Teller smiled: “It’s instinct.” You have to
be clever about what excites you,” he explained. “Other things you turn down. You
need to stay curious.”
Even Enninful, who has known Juergen for over thirty years, acknowledged this
uncompromising clarity. “You’ve always known what you want and what makes you
happy,” he said. “That’s something you’ve really carried on.”
As the conversation continued, Enninful asked, “How can a young photographer in
today’s world, have a singular vision and be able to perfect it?” To which Teller
replied, half-laughing, half-philosophical: “Would one even want to be a
photographer now? It’s a very difficult environment, everything has to be so loud. But
in the 90s, we didn’t mind being poor. We were naïve, enthusiastic, experimenting.
We had time to play.”
Listening to them, I realised I wasn’t just in the audience.
In the 90s, I was in my early twenties, a fashion student in Milan discovering
everything for the first time. I remember the Helmut Lang campaigns, that raw
energy that felt so new. The first time I saw Teller’s portraits and didn’t quite
understand why they felt real. I remember Sinéad O’Connor and Buffalo Stance on
the radio. It all blurred together, fashion, music, and attitude, a cultural moment that
defined how we saw ourselves.
Hearing him speak, I was reminded of the innocence of that time, the creativity born
from having so little. We made things with what we had. There was no fear of failure,
if it worked, it worked. If it didn’t, it didn’t. It reminded me how unpolished everything
was, and how freeing that could be.
It also echoed something I often think about as an educator: how the creative
process itself has changed. Back then, we had to go out and look for things. You
went to exhibitions, record shops, libraries, and galleries; creativity demanded
curiosity. We were hunters, searching for creativity and inspiration by accident, not
by algorithm. Everything happened more slowly and organically. That thrill of
discovering something by accident is missing.
That innocence, that energy, that hunger that made you believe anything was
possible. Today everything feels faster, more direct, but also less surprising. Maybe
that’s what Teller means when he speaks about failure, not as loss, but as freedom.
The freedom to explore, to experiment, before everything became so instantly
accessible.
“We had a deep enthusiasm, and it was a way of living and experimenting and
playing.”
That idea feels almost utopian now to fail without fear, to play without an algorithm
waiting to measure it.
As a last question to the conversation, Enninful asked what advice Teller would give
his younger self. He paused, then said: “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Have
your moral compass right. Even if you’re unsure, be sure of yourself. I wouldn’t have
changed anything.”
It was a moving expression of acceptance rather than confidence. The sense that a
creative life is built on instinct, on following what feels right even when the outcome
is uncertain.
After the conversation, outside the Petit Palais, Teller stood in his grey tee, jeans,
and the now-famous pink sweatshirt thrown over his shoulders, relaxed, grounded,
fag in hand, and disinterested in polish. A bright contrast to my monochromatic
uniform. Maybe that’s what we’ve lost in the rush for polish: the right to be unsure.
It struck me that he hasn’t really changed. The honesty that shaped his pictures in
the 90s, imperfect, immediate, human, is still there.
Maybe the real nostalgia isn’t for the decade itself, but for that kind of freedom. The
90s weren’t cleaner or better; they were just truer.
And that’s the real lesson. Creative integrity isn’t about reinventing yourself
endlessly, but about staying true to the impulse that started it all.
It struck me that he hasn’t really changed. The honesty that shaped his pictures in
the 90s, imperfect, immediate, human, is still there.
Maybe the real nostalgia isn’t for the decade itself, but for that kind of freedom. The
90s weren’t cleaner or better; they were just truer.
And that’s the real lesson. Creative integrity isn’t about reinventing yourself
endlessly, but about staying true to the impulse that started it all.
