In the summer of 2005, Steidl published a modest booklet of London-based, German-born, mono.kultur #08 photographer Juergen Teller’s work, titled The Master. This booklet offered a characteristic portrait of Teller’s own world and his persona as a photographer, with a mixture of fashion and commissioned works printed alongside self-portraits, family photographs and scenes from his Bavarian childhood home. The starting point for that book was a set of portraits that Teller had made of two of his heroes, the photographers William Eggleston and Nobuyoshi Araki, hence the title. Images of celebrities featured alongside these two masters included Marilyn Manson, Kurt Cobain and Simon McBurney. Almost immediately, the book went out of print – and so a second edition of the The Master is now being printed, The Master II, which has just been released, marking the beginning of a series of booklets that will culminate in a slipcased edition of 10 or more, at some point in the future. The Master II contains Teller’s recent body of work, Ukraine, in which he employs the city of Kiev as the setting for a fashion shoot and then mixes fashion, still lifes of the city and portraits of ordinary people in order to construct a singular fantasy of a country full of brash, youthful energy, deep in the thrall of capitalism.
