Wolfgang Tillmans: A Life for a Picture of the World

You've definitely seen a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans

…it could have been a photo of Lady Gaga, a magazine picture from the Berlin Love Parade or from a trendy publication, depicting events in a trendy London club – or simply a photograph of beautiful people, or a scene with not-so-beautiful people, contrary to all other simplifications, not necessarily a depiction from the gay scene or from the trendy clubs of our world, and not necessarily with a lot of bare skin: Kate Moss, for example, is quite clothed in her portraits, and Wolfgang Tillmans has produced very different photographs, still lifes, abstractions, installations, and experimental photographs based on photocopies.

Whatever you saw, you viewed a work by one of the most important photographers of our time, ranked 26th on the "World's Best Art" list , having just climbed four places. It's time to take a closer look at the life and work of this amazing artist:

Wolfgang Tillmans was born on August 16, 1968, exactly 10 years after Madonna. While she left sleepy Bay City in the US state of Michigan for New York to pursue her career, Wolfgang Tillmans, from the presumably no less sleepy Remscheid, initially moved to England, where as a language student he became acquainted with British youth culture with great interest.

Even during this time, Tillmans was interested in photography, taking and collecting photographs, developing an eye for different layout forms, and making initial contacts with English style and music magazines such as “The Face” and “iD”, which he would soon draw upon.

After moving from Remscheid to Hamburg in 1987, the first successes of the “environmentally generated” photographer soon followed (Tillmans: “I became a photographer before I even realized it myself.”):

His first solo exhibitions took place in cultural centers, and since 1988 he has worked regularly for the English magazine “iD”. At the same time, Tillmans immersed himself in Hamburg's burgeoning rave scene , becoming (not necessarily by choice) a documentarian of the emerging subculture . iD, Prinz, Spex, Tempo – the trendy scene magazines – clamored for his snapshots and nightlife portraits. By the end of the 1980s, at the age of 20, Tillmans was financially independent thanks to his photographs of Hamburg's nightlife.

Success and independence are fine, but Tillmans wanted to know more and in 1990 went to England to study art at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in Poole, Dorset.

After that, he moved to London in 1992 and then to New York in 1994, where he met painter and photographer Jochen Klein , his partner for the next few years. In 1996, Tillmans and Klein moved back to London, where they lived together until Jochen Klein died of AIDS in 1997. Tillmans continued to live in London for many years, traveled extensively, and since 2007 has divided his time between Berlin and London.

First recognition as a photography artist

In the early 1990s, Tillmans photographed everyone who came before his lens, all his friends and other young people in his immediate circle. His striking portraits brought him increasing fame.

His photographs, for example of the European Gay Pride in London (1992) or the Love Parade in Berlin (1992), appeared in magazines such as i-D, Spex, Interview, SZ-Magazin and Butt-Magazine, establishing his reputation as a prominent chronicler of current social trends. Since then, he has been considered a “chronicler of his generation, especially of the London club and gay scene” .

The artistic brilliance of his photographs convinced every aesthetically discerning viewer, and critics soon hailed them as groundbreaking. The series featuring his friends Lutz and Alex, also first published in iD in 1992, are now considered artistic and documentary icons of the 1990s.

The path to one's own style is more complex

For Tillmans, however, this “style formation” was only one of the many stages on the way to his own style; anyone who “wants to understand the world through images” will pursue different motives than a limited group of people and experiment more with the camera than the immediate, however impressively successful, depiction of the subject.

That is precisely what Tillmans did: he produced photographs of every existing genre and all genres yet to be invented, using the camera in every conceivable way. He photographed details and the big picture, the concrete and the abstract, people and things, the small and the large, women and men, cities and landscapes, day and night, earth and sky, planet and universe.

He developed all these photographs in many different sizes and presented them not only hanging on the wall, but also horizontally and as part of installations. Tillmans even explored photographic representation without a camera by learning about the chemistry behind film development and creating works in the darkroom using only this chemistry. He also sometimes completely dispensed with the subject in the traditional sense, making the photographic paper itself the focus of the representation.

For his world tour towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century, which resulted in the “New World” (exhibition and book project) , Tillmans used digital photography for the first time. For a long time, he could not see any added benefit in digital image capture compared to photography with his analog 35mm SLR camera; he felt that looking through the viewfinder of the SLR camera most closely corresponded to human vision.

In 2009, however, Tillmans noted that the higher resolution of digital photographs achieved by then “follows a transformation throughout the world and that it is therefore only inevitable that the uncatchability of this information density would be reflected in his pictures; the creation of HD recordings describes his perception quite well again.”.

Please do not get the idea from the above paragraph that Tillmans does not follow technological progress; for a long time, his studio has been equipped with a network of five computers, a high-resolution scanner and a huge inkjet printer, and there is also a very meticulously maintained electronic catalogue raisonné.

Tillmans refuses to let the developers of the technology dictate how and when to use it; he has developed his own decision-making authority in this respect and is therefore extremely unsuitable as a first-generation customer or not only unpaid but also personally contributing to the development of immature products.

Success breeds self-confidence – and self-confidence leads to success?

The media often speculates that Tillmans might be annoyed when asked about his time as a "scene photographer" in the 1990s. This begs the question, however, why Tillmans is asked about this period in every single interview, instead of simply presenting these facts as background information at the beginning of the interview.

One could also leave assumptions as assumptions, or assume something else, which, in view of Tillman's development, is most likely much more appropriate: that he has long since left the "scene photographer" behind, that he was and is occupied "with a few other thoughts".

Since his days of people photography, Tillmans has done an incredible amount, learned and taught an incredible amount, visited an incredible number of places in the world, and created an incredible amount of completely differently structured art; there is some probability that he couldn't care less whether he is still asked about this old chestnut or not.

It could be quite interesting, for example, if one were to ask the impressively calm and self-assured Tillmans whether and to what extent early financial independence fosters the courage to follow one's own thoughts and convictions and to learn what seems important to oneself, without listening too much to those around oneself who only supposedly offer advice. Hardly anyone could answer this question better than him.

But perhaps one shouldn't ask him that... because even Tillman's early works suggest that he undoubtedly "would have made it" even without this early financial independence – and many others had to and did make it without early financial independence; asking such questions might even discourage young artists – in times of rampant capitalism with many negative consequences for cultural workers, truly a crime that should be punished.

So, instead, let's take a tiny but liberating glimpse into the life of Wolfgang Tillmans, a life not burdened by many consumer goods: Some famous photos of crumpled garments only came about because these garments had been hung up to dry in that exact spot and, during the drying process, had produced such extraordinarily decorative folds that Tillmans "portrayed" them – the artist revealed in 2003 that he had never owned a clothesline; hopefully, that's still the case today, we want to see many more beautiful wrinkled Mars landscapes!

In any case, Tillmans has long since proven that he has more ideas than just photographing people, however impressive the results of his "people photography" may be. Tillmans has likely used every opportunity to comprehensively explore his genre, and if he hasn't, he will surely think of the untested possibility before anyone else, and he will try it out.

To be able to make this claim with reasonable certainty, one only needs to look at one of his recent exhibitions, or let oneself be carried away a little into the “Tillmans realm” on his website ; his curiosity and desire for the diversity of topics are quite obvious (of course, one could simply ask him, but Tillmans reveals his joy in his work so frequently in current works, teaching and interviews that one really doesn't want to bother him again with such banal questions).

Curiosity leads to excursions

When he is not busy with one of his well over 100 solo exhibitions or around 350 group exhibitions, teaching, or accepting one of his numerous awards, Tillman's inquisitive attitude towards life, characterized by a desire to correct societal problems, can also be seen in his numerous projects "related to his artistic work":

In 2001, he participated in a competition held by the city of Munich to design an AIDS memorial, creating a sky-blue column of hope with a powerfully moving inscription and winning. In 2002, he directed a mouse-themed music video for the Pet Shop Boys' single "Home & Dry," which still enjoys cult status today.

In 2066, Tillmans opened the exhibition space “Between Bridges” , where he displays (mostly political) art that, in his view, receives too little attention, free from financial intentions.

Those eager to learn are welcome to participate early on

Tillmans was offered his first visiting professorship at the age of 30; from 1998 to 1999 he taught at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.

From 2003 to 2006, he held a professorship that was likely very much to Tillman's liking: He taught "interdisciplinary art" at the Städelschule (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Frankfurt am Main – that is, "fine art" for students of different media, all in one class. The Städelschule is considered a pioneer in the efforts to break down the rigid class divisions based on media, as has long been the prevailing trend.

Since 2012, Wolfgang Tillmans has been committed to his art and to the next generation as a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and since 2013 as a Member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

The artist becomes a critic of his own genre

It is now clearly observable how Tillmans' thorough exploration of the possibilities of understanding the world through photography is resulting in insights that Tillmans has considered sufficiently to deem them worth sharing.

His works since the turn of the millennium have often contained warnings to be critical when viewing images and to trust one's own eyes; the installation “Bali” is a single collection of attacks against liars and fraudsters who use falsified and incomplete images for their dogmatic purposes.

“Bali” is also about Bali. Here, a whole conglomerate of thoughtless human interventions has ensured that Bali tops the list of threatened coral reefs (which are not only beautiful, but whose protective function is essential for Bali's continued existence). Tillmans criticizes the idealized imagery that feigns untouched nature, a grotesquely deceitful stylization of the endangered island.

But “Bali” is everywhere: in political reporting and in documentaries on the international legal assessment of war events, in stickers that portray Islamic values ​​as clearly superior to those of the Western world, in AIDS brochures and in advertisements for ideal holiday destinations that are in reality almost entirely controlled by the NPD, not only in images but also effectively supported by (also displayed by Tillmans) language documents.

Tillmans increasingly urges us to keep our eyes open, to investigate the falsifying images and accompanying writings, and to trust our own common sense.

Tillman's pictures can help us get to the bottom of the true content; he has been working on this for a long time, and (hopefully) he will not stop for a long time to come:

“Although I know that the camera lies, I still cling to the idea of ​​a photographic truth.”.

You can find out where to view current exhibitions and many of these pictures in the article “Wolfgang Tillmans Photography Art” .

More works by this artist, as well as a current exhibition schedule, can be found on the official website: https://tillmans.co.uk/