Wolfgang Tillmans

His photographs might capture an evanescent instant, but together -- in groups or pairs, assemblages or arrangements -- they stretch beyond the instantaneous. Communicating among themselves, Tillmans' images develop narratives, forming a world, a habitat, a social milieu out of their variegated resonance.
Like Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson, Tillmans is a documenter of youth. His preferred subjects are young club kids, DJs, ravers, and punks who live their lives outside, splayed out in the streets, huddled in corners, or dancing ecstatically. But his documentary of this culture is too close, too personalized, too stylized, and too selective to be a documentary in the normal sense.

It's as if Tillmans composes the instants he captures. His intent is to portray the personality of this or that world by means of a discrete aesthetic sense that selects and contrives fleeting instants. This is not to say that Tillmans merely inserts himself into all his pictures: on the contrary, his is a collectively contrived world, strung somewhere between photographer and subject, disclosed in the instant of an awaited, tacitly controlled encounter.

Hope and death, sickness and life, Heaven and Hell, are Tillmans' repeated themes. He often juxtaposes disparate images, some effusing peace, tranquility, and redemption alongside others portraying death, sickness, and suffering. For Tillmans the two are always intertwined. In one image his lover Jochan Klein, who died of AIDS, reclines in a bathtub, distant and isolated. In another, two hands are clasped across a blanket; a heart monitor is attached to one of them. Next to this image is an ephemeral image of Kate Moss, hovering and smiling in a light, flowing, white blouse. Between these images something resonates. There is love amid sickness, with angelic grace lingering lambently above it all. Tillmans' world is both sacred and profane, a lost world that nevertheless rediscovers itself in epiphanic moments of bliss and redemption.

Tillmans has also focused his attention on architecture, design, and still life. A 1991 exhibit was devoted to a taxonomy of folds. Here the images develop the formal qualities of different kinds of folded fabrics, with a focus on shape, texture, and color, as well as on exploiting the narrative aspects inherent in clothing. And in 1997 Tillmans devoted a series of photographs to the supersonic aircraft Concorde, evoking by means of environment and light a kind of techno-mythology of the air. He also has a predilection for still lifes of food. In each case Tillmans brings the formal scrutiny of the painter to his photographs, composing the very events that he captures.


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