EYE CANDY

Revisit Juergen Teller’s Legendary ’90s Modeling Go-Sees Photos, Featuring a Pale, Teenaged Gisele

Dec. 10, 2017

Over the course of a year, beginning in May of 1998, the German photographer Juergen Teller took at least 462 photos from the doorway of his London studio, capturing the models who visited him before or after they came in. Teller documented all of those so-called “go-sees,” which are still common practice in the industry today but which he nevertheless had a fascination with—and had initially had tried to circumvent by visiting the agency offices himself. “I thought it was a weird idea—girls coming to see me as a man,” Teller said recently. His dogged documentation, currently on view in an exhibition up at Alison Jacques Gallery in London through January 13, has since become the stuff of legend, showcasing Teller’s early talent for injecting a raw glamour into any old space, as witnessed more recently with, say, Oprah; the range of personality in the models’s reactions and sense of style, from the meek to those itching to show off their ballet training; and, of course, the early snapshots of young models who would soon become legends, from a waifish Mariacarla Boscono tugging at her cardigan to a teenaged, notably less tan Gisele, who posed atop a Mercedes looking surly in socks and Birkenstocks. Take a look back in time, here.