Utopia through a lens

'Gay Porn Photographer Snaps Up Turner Prize', read one notoriously silly headline when Wolfgang Tillmans became the youngest artist, and the first photographer, to win the prize back in 2000. Now that the German-born 34-year-old has the first major survey of his work opening tomorrow at Tate Britain, that Daily Telegraph sub might be advised to keep hold of their smelling salts.

But it wasn't just the news journos who got over-excited for all the wrong reasons. Critics are also firmly divided as to Tillmans's artistic merits.

One art writer wasn't so much perturbed by the acres of bum flesh and phalluses (of which there isn't that much anyway) but, Tillmans says, she wrote 'the most vicious article' taking exception to his apparently 'dumbly positive' take on the world, which - as she might have had it - was full of drug-fuelled hedonists.

How does he respond to such criticism? 'You know that they do not look, and that they are like parrots repeating the myths that have been ascribed to me.'

Tillmans was still getting over the death of his longterm partner when he took many of the pictures for which he stood accused of being a glib happy snapper. 'I choose not to be one of those artists who wields their trauma or their grief or their cancer in front of the viewer,' he says. 'I never made it into a kind of reading instrument for my work, even though of course it does matter. Anyway,' he says of the critic's comment, 'it was a glaring stupidity.'

Another thing that upsets Tillmans is that people have labelled him a fashion photographer, but he doesn't even do many commercial commissions. He did, however, come up through the ranks of 1990s style bible i-D, though the photographer clearly hates the fact that journalists still link him with that whole street-fashion aesthetic. And so it must be to his eternal chagrin that he often gets lumped together with that other German style-bibleist, Juergen Teller (see Top 5), who is an ex-fashion photographer.

'My pictures really are about the very fundamental human experiences that a 60-year-old artist thinks about, but I did that through the medium of my contemporaries', he says. 'I don't think day-to-day: "I'm in this social scene". I think: "How am I going to translate that ripple of water in this glass? How do I do that?"'

Does he think his work is confrontational? 'What I have observed is that people immediately feel attacked by somebody just being at ease with themselves. Because the moment something comes across as real and unstaged and comfortable, it has so much more power.'

And therein, Tillmans suggests, lies the difficulty some viewers may have with his work: the people in them make no apologies for who they are and what they do. Moreover, the ordinariness of their actions and their intimate physicality is, he says, transformed into a kind of revealing beauty. And far from being the grungy, dirty realist that journalists insist Tillmans is, he would probably agree that there is a deeply romantic strain in his work. 'It uses the language of realism, but it has quite a Utopian quality as well when the subject is transformed. It's not that I want to whitewash the world, it's more like challenging perceived ideas.'

'Transformation' and 'Utopian' are two words that crop up a lot in Tillmans's vocabulary. And whether it's two travellers perched on tree branches, a still life framed against a window or his more recent 'abstract' photographs that have been manually manipulated in the dark room and are full of light and brilliant colour, he insists that his work is always about transcending the seemingly banal.