Go-Sees Reduced

From Juergen Teller's Go-Sees:

A 'go-see' is a particular kind of vetting process in the fashion industry. Unlike a 'casting', the go-see is conducted without the prospect of a definite commission. As an open-ended yet structured encounter between the photographer and his subject, the stakes are nevertheless high, and the expectations intense. This is a model's testing ground, a trial of sorts, with the proviso that neither photographer nor model, who is also known as a go-see, is working to meet the requirements of a specific assignment.

In Go-Sees Juergen Teller chronicles a year of such meetings with women and young girls from all walks of life. Some of them are celebrated, most of them are not. The book is both a photographic journal and a record of the attendant pressures to find a 'new' face that dictate the form of the go-see itself. Shot in the doorway of Teller's London studio, this is a two-way exploration that recognizes the photographer's complicity in the framing of his subjects and in promoting a specific conception of the photogenic. The models in Go-Sees become much more than bearers of externally directed aesthetic values. While the photographic gaze is shaped by and reciprocally shapes the conventions of the go-see, Teller suggests that even within these parameters it is possible to find new ways of seeing.

These are photographs of arrival and departure, portraits of brief but loaded encounters that articulate underlying continuities and discontinuities. The changing texture of light registers the passing seasons, while the recurrent backdrop hints at an overarching narrative. The models become characters in a fiction that the viewer is invited to imagine.

I see go-sees often at work and all I could think after reading the book for the first time in years, was "where's the violence--how could they dare to ignore it?"

So I decided to remove everything Teller added and reduce his book back to the essence I see.


Please view the full images as well - Image 1, Image 2