four books by Wolfgang Tillmans review: thrilling, explicit and dazzling

The recording angel of the eternally youthful gay and club scenes may be 52 now, but he still has the power to force us to see the universe in a new light, says David Ekserdjian

Wolfgang Tillmans

Taschen

David Ekserdjian

10 February 2021

I do not know if the World Wildlife Fund has got round to putting maiden aunts on the Endangered Species List, but this latest effort from Wolfgang Tillmans, which brings together four previous volumes – Wolfgang Tillmans 1995, Burg 1998, truth study center 2005, and Neue Welt 2012 in abridged form - contains a number of startlingly explicit images that might easily polish them off.

Taken as a whole, however, what thrills, delights, and dazzles is the sheer range of their creator’s visual imagination.

By definition, photographs involve an artful process of selection from the endless riches offered by the world around us, and moreover Tillmans is almost constantly at work, for all that he only pays a minute fraction of his production the compliment of sharing it with the public.

At the same time, the best photographs – and they are to be found here in their multitudes – have the strange power to force us to see the universe in a new light. It is hard to believe it, but Tillmans – the recording angel of the eternally youthful gay and club scenes – has now reached the ripe old age of fifty-two.

Inevitably, therefore, he runs the risk of seeming to be a known quantity, and yet here he is revealed as almost infinitely various. I cannot claim to be a leading expert on his work, but as I turned the pages of this compact and affordable anthology (as a rule, art books are not exactly cheap), I found myself wondering if – seen out of context - I would have been able to recognise that particular images were his.

Maybe the answer is that what unifies this richly diverse body of work is the unfailing sense of human sympathy, even when he is producing ‘abstract’ photos or images of the measureless ocean. It is of course even more obvious in such haunting portraits as the one of the centenarian Oscar Niemeyer, the creator of Brasilia, taken in 2010. Here, as on occasion elsewhere throughout the books, there is a brief accompanying text (‘Oscar Niemeyer died in 2012, aged 104. 104 years prior to his birth was the year 1803.’).

Having looked up the Wikipedia page on Niemeyer, which opens with a beguiling photograph of him taken in 1968 holding a ciggy in his right hand, I could not help suspecting that the fearlessly iconoclastic Tillmans would rather approve.

four books by Wolfgang Tillmans (Taschen, £20)

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four books by Wolfgang Tillmans review: thrilling, explicit and dazzling