Wolfgang Tillmans (born 16 August 1968) is a German fine-art photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium's foundations.
Tillmans was the first photographer, and first non-British person, to be awarded the Turner Prize. He has been the subject of large-scale retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and Moderna Museet. In 2023, Tillmans was named one of the most influential people in the world by Time. He lives in Berlin and London.
Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid in the German area of Bergisches Land. At the age of 14 to 16, visits to museums in Düsseldorf and to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne acquainted him with the photo-based art of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, which counts among his earliest influences. During his first visit to England as an exchange student in 1983, he discovered British youth culture and the local fashion and music magazines of the time. Also in high school, he became friends with Alexandra Bircken and Lutz Huelle.
From 1987 to 1990, Tillmans lived in Hamburg; there, in 1988, he had his first solo exhibitions, at Café Gnosa, Fabrik-Foto-Forum, and Front. From 1990 through 1992, he studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design in southern England.
After his studies, he moved to London and then to New York in 1994 for a year, where he met the German painter Jochen Klein. After moving back to England, Tillmans lived with Klein until Klein died of AIDS-related complications in 1997.
From 1995, Tillmans primarily lived and worked in London. During the summer of 1998, Tillmans participated in a month-long residency at the last active Shaker community in the world, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
Since 2007, Tillmans has divided his time between Berlin and London. In Berlin, his studio is located in an annex of a modernist building from the early 1930s, designed by the architect Max Taut.
Tillmans was initially known for his seemingly casual, sometimes snapshot-like portraits of friends (most notably, fashion designer Lutz Huelle and fellow artist Alexandra Bircken) and other youth in his immediate surroundings and scene. His photos – from the Europride in London (1992) or the Love Parade in Berlin (1992), for example – appeared in magazines such as i-D, Spex, Interview, SZ Magazin and Butt, and established his reputation as a prominent witness of a contemporary social movement. He was made co-editor of Spex in 1997. For the Index Magazine, he shot covers and assignments, including images of John Waters, Gilbert & George, and Udo Kier.
Tillmans was considered the "documentarian of his generation, especially that of the London club and gay scenes" (though he has said "It was never my intention to be seen as diaristic or autobiographical. I was not recording the world around me or my tribe or whatever. There is a big misunderstanding there that still persists to this day."). Half of his work is staged, with the artist choosing the clothes and the location, as well as setting his models up in their positions. The series of his friends Lutz and Alex, also published in i-D in 1992, are considered important photographic documents of the 1990s. In his early photographs of people, Tillmans portrayed freedom in a different way and he says: "I wanted to somehow represent what was not being represented elsewhere." From 1992 to 1994 Tillmans lived and worked in London, moving to New York in 1994. During this time, he began to show more frequently, developing an exhibition style that consisted of nonhierarchical arrangements of unframed photographs pinned or taped onto the gallery's walls. Color photographs are placed next to inkjet prints and next to postcards and magazine clippings of his own images, reaching almost to the ceiling and the floor. He views each exhibition as a site-specific installation, often addressing the exhibition space as a larger composition.
"Pictures, in order to see the world"
Tillmans' photographic practice subsequently developed to encompass a wide array of genres. His portraits, still lifes, sky photographs (e.g. the Concorde series), astrophotography, aerial shots and landscapes are motivated equally by aesthetic and political interests, especially related to homosexuality and gender identity. Tillmans says of his work: "I take pictures, in order to see the world." He produces images for installations in three sizes, from small to very large, and either in signed, mounted prints, which must be protected in a frame, or as replaceable inkjet prints that can be attached directly to the wall (the latter generated by a certificate-authenticated optical disc). They are installed in meticulous wall installations, sometimes combined with photocopies, and magazine and newspaper clippings (for example, in the installation "Soldiers – The Nineties"); or presented in vitrines, arranged in extensive table-installations ("truth study center"). Operating on the basis of the fundamental equality of all motifs and supports, through this continual re-arranging, repositioning, questioning and reinforcement, Tillmans avoids ascribing any 'conclusions' to his work and thus subjects his photographic vision to a perpetual re-contextualization.
In 2009, after Tillmans had been using an analog 50 mm Contax SLR camera almost exclusively for over two decades, he turned to digital photography. In 2012, he abandoned film altogether and became a full-time digital photographer. In an interview that year, he describes the corresponding change from using viewfinders to integrated camera monitors as "completely turning on its head the psychology of photography, which has always been a dialogue between photographer, object and the imaginary image that one is envisioning, thinking, hoping for." According to Tillmans, the higher resolution of digital photographs correlates to "a transformation in the whole world"; he further explains: "In recent years, everything has become HD, so I think it is inevitable that the overwhelming nature of this information density is reflected in my images. In this way, they again describe quite well my sense of perception today."
Wolfgang has a passion and love for the streets and the clubs. Which this two inspire him in his work along with his work in the gay rights movement.(Jobey, 2010).
The 56 photographs of equal dimensions that make up the Concorde Grid were taken in and around London as part of a commission for Tillmans' exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 1997. Shot from a wide range of places, including private gardens, parks, railway tracks, and the perimeter fence around Heathrow airport, they record the daily passing of the airplane. Total Solar Eclipse Grid (1998), a set of which was included in his Turner Prize installation and is now in the permanent collection of the Tate, documents the spectacle of a solar eclipse. Each of the 21 photographs in the grid was taken during the eclipse of his immediate surroundings in a tropical locale, with varying degrees of light and detail. Snow/Ice Grid (1999) is a grid of images of trampled and melting ice and snow.
Tillmans exhibited his first abstract and damaged pictures as a Parkett edition in 1998. The edition, 60 unique works on color-negative photographic paper collected by the artist since he began colour printing in 1990, was a combination of true darkroom mistakes and years of darkroom experimentation that they inspired. The Silver works, which Tillmans has been creating since 1998, reflect the reaction of the photographic paper to light, as well as mechanical and chemical processes. The name Silver arises from the dirt traces and silver salt stains that remain on the paper when the artist develops the photographs in a machine that is filled with water and has not been completely cleaned.
Since 2000, Tillmans has become increasingly interested in the chemical foundations of photographic material, as well as its haptic and spatial possibilities. The "Conquistador" series of photographs were the first of these interventions to be exhibited. Later works created directly in the darkroom without the use of a camera, and often largely accidental (e.g. "Blushes", "Mental Pictures", and "Freischwimmer"), present photography as a self-referential medium – one that could serve as an experimental ground for the creation of a new type of image structure. These "abstract" works now appear next to the figurative photographs. In "Blushes", fine, thread-like lines, apparently drawn with light, swim over the surface of the photographic paper, and create delicate, fluid patterns.