Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller depicts the German-born photographer in a print derived from a photographic source. Artz, herself trained as a portrait photographer, here turns the camera's record over to the woodblock: the image is decomposed into separately carved blocks, inked with water-based pigment, and printed in sequence onto [washi](/glossary/washi) with the [baren](/glossary/baren). A portrait of a fellow photographer carries an implicit dialogue between two ways of fixing a likeness — one nearly instantaneous and chemical, the other slow, sequential, and physical. Continuous photographic tone becomes a small number of color planes; surface texture comes from the paper rather than the lens. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradients handle transitions of light and shadow that the carved edge alone could not describe. Within Artz's portrait practice, this print belongs to a body of work in which sitters drawn from photography, art, science, and literature are registered through mokuhanga's particular logic of carving, inking, and registration.