Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

by Wolfgang Tillmans (Photographer), Roxana Marcoci (Editor), Clément Chéroux (Editor)

Encompassing photography, installation, print media, video and more, this publication is the most comprehensive account of Tillmans’ wide-ranging career to date.

A visionary creator and intrepid polymath, Wolfgang Tillmans unites formal inventiveness with an ethical orientation that attends to the most pressing issues of life today. While his work transcends the bounds of any single artistic discipline, he is best known for his wide-ranging photographic output. From trenchant documents of social movements to windowsill still lifes, ecstatic images of nightlife to cameraless abstractions, sensitive portraits to architectural studies, astronomical phenomena to intimate nudes, he has explored seemingly every genre of photography imaginable, continually experimenting with how to make new pictures and deepen the viewer’s experience.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition of Tillmans’ work at the Museum of Modern Art, this copiously illustrated volume surveys four decades of the artist’s career. An outstanding group of writers offer diverse essays addressing key threads of his multifaceted practice, and a new text by Tillmans himself elucidates the distinctive methodology behind his system of presenting photographs. Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear grants readers new insight into the work of an artist who has not only changed the way photography is exhibited but pointed contemporary art in dynamic new directions.

Genres: Art, Photography

190 pages, Hardcover

First published August 30, 2022

About the author

Wolfgang Tillmans is an influential contemporary German photographer whose work is in dialogue with artists such as Andreas Gursky and Gerhard Richter. Emerging in the 1990s with his snapshots of teenagers, clubs, and LGBTQ culture, Tillman’s practice has expanded to include diaristic photography, large-scale abstraction, and commissioned magazine work. “I want the pictures to be working in both directions,” the artist has said. “I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience.” Capturing landscapes from an airplane window, still lifes of crustaceans, or straightforward portraits, his work conveys the profundity of an encyclopedic archive. Tillmans’ attention to even the most incidental moments can be seen in his Concorde Grid (1997), a group of 56 color photos depicting the airplane taking off along with the surrounding scenes captured during the moments in between.

Born on August 16, 1968 in Remscheid, West Germany, Tillmans spent the early part of his career in London after graduating from the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, marking the first time the prize had been awarded to a photographer or non-British artist. In 2006, Tillmans established Between Bridges, a non-profit exhibition space located in Berlin. His survey show “Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017” opened at the Tate Modern in London to critical acclaim, cementing his stature in the contemporary art world. The artist currently lives and works between Berlin, Germany and London, United Kingdom. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others.