Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Vogue Features 1989 – 2006  
Subject: 20th Century    

In the winter of 2000, shortly after becoming the first non-British Artist ever to be awarded the Turner Prize, the German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans went to a disco to celebrate. He likes discos, not just for the dancing – which he does a lot of, in a vigorous and teutonically upright style – but also for their play of light. For a long time he had one of those quintessentially kitsch dancefloor accessories, a revolving mirrored globe, suspended from the ceiling of his studio. Now disco has entered his work in another way. For part of his new show at Interim Art – his first one-man exhibition in London since winning the Turner – Tillmans is making a documentary/art film on the unlikely subject of dance lighting systems and the people who design them. “I love the rhythms and the patterns created by the disco light-designers, the ‘light-jockeys’, as they’re called,” he says; “I love the strange sense of community they create, drawing everyone into the experience of whatever music you might be listening too. I want to get some of that sense of rhythm into my own work. I feel a kinship with those guys. As a photographer, I work with light, so I’m a kind of light-jockey too.” He talks about this idiosyncratically retro-groovy project with such enthusiasm that it is impossible to doubt his commitment to it; who knows, perhaps the result will turn out to be some strange kind of masterpiece.

An affable and distinctly fresh-faced 33, Wolfgang Tillmans is clearly enjoying his moment in the limelight. He moved to London ten years ago, and says that being given the Turner Prize “sort of put an official stamp on the very warm welcome I had already received here. I was very touched by it, and also relieved – because however much you try not to care too much about awards it must be really horrible to get all dressed up and with all those people there, and to lose. That must be vile. But I won, and it was great!” He smiles a broad, infectious smile. It still is great. He seems to have exhibitions planned in just about every major country in the world; collectors are queing around the block to get hold of (extremely limited) editions of his work; and prices have gone through the roof. “Everyone wants to work with Wolfgang” is one of the buzz-phrases of the London art scene at the moment (pronounced, obligatorily, in a cod Marlene Dietrich accent). But Tillmans’ life is not all work and no play. Having recently rediscovered how much he enjoys London’s gay bar and nightclub scene, he starts listing his favourite hangouts, beginning with Compton’s in Old Compton Street - but abruptly stops, not wanting them all listed in a magazine. “They might get too crowded.”

Tillmans remains committed to London, and recently moved into a new studio in a part of East London fashionable with artists but still more or less completely unyuppified. The only shops in his neck of the woods are newsagents and the dodgier kinds of fast-food outlets, selling chicken and chips, fish and chips, kebabs and chips, and gunge-oozing baked potatoes so thoroughly microwaved they look as if they have been nuked; while the only businesses around seem to be bargain basement fashion suppliers and cheap clothing sweatshops.

Tillmans answers his own doorbell, although he cannot at first open the door to his studio because a sleeping tramp has managed to wedge himself against it. The photographer handles what could have been an awkward situation with exemplary tact. Courteous request; tramp moves; door opens; tramp goes back to sleep. Tillmans’ politeness on this occasion comes as no surprise. When he was invited to be guest editor for a week last year on the Big Issue (the magazine sold by and for the London homeless) the photographer put together a portfolio of pictures showing the grim sleeping conditions endured by tramps – a mute tribute to those with no fixed abode. The Tillmans studio, by contrast with the world outside, is an oasis of bohemian cool. The artist, who wears black jackboots and camouflage combats interestingly contrasted with a bright red paisley shirt, has had something of a makeover since his night of Turner Prize glory. Then he looked almost like a businessman, in a skinny, black-clad, Agnes B kind of way; now he looks like some self-invented species of neo-Punk, complete with shaven head and the beginnings of a Mohican crest, as yet undyed.

The sun streams in through huge warehouse windows. A quarter of a mile away, a train on an elevated section of the London Underground passes through at eye level, bisecting a cityscape dominated by tower blocks and light-industrial architecture. The view is not picture postcard but has a shabby urban beauty, nonetheless – the kind of beauty, in fact, that is often encountered in a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph. Today, in fact, the studio’s acres of white wall-space are mostly hung with landscapes. A stunning sunset in the Arizona desert, blazing yellow and vermilion, stands out on the far wall. In the background a pair of inevitably beautiful studio assistants, one boy, one girl, bustle around purposefully, keeping the wheels of the Tillmans production machine turning.

Tillmans takes a lot of pictures but remains curiously hard to categorise, since he has in his time worked in just about every genre of photography. He is known for his portraits but also his still lifes;for landscapes and cityscapes but also for numerous photographs of unusual slices of modern life: clubbers in Hamburg, nuclear protesters in Scotland, makers of theatrical props in New York, to name just some. Recently he has become interested in “the kinds of pictures that can be produced purely in the darkroom, without even taking a photograph”. They are produced using photographic paper, chemicals, a controlled spectrum of projected light and one or two “special methods” which, he says – sounding for a moment like one of the Renaissance painters, who were similarly wary of sharing their technical “secrets” – he would really rather not go into. The results are near-abstract, often rose- or red-tinged, marked by effects of spatter, dripping, or filigree fineness. To some he has given the collective title Blushes, which suggests blood coming to the surface: a resemblance visually evoked too. They may, perhaps, amount to some sort of elegy to Tillmans’s late boyfriend, the painter Jochen Klein, who died of AIDS in 1997. Tillmans leaves the matter open. The interpretation of his work is something he prefers to leave to others.

Tillmans’ photographs range from small prints to gigantic inkjets the size of advertising hoardings and seem almost bewilderingly varied in their subject matter. His latest book of pictures, View From Above, is typical in (so to speak) the very untypicality of the images that it contains. A random flip-through produces a black-and-white picture of a blurred dog hurdling a puddle; a vibrant evening sky seen through the leaves of some trees in silhouette; an abstract photochemically manipulated image of what looks like blood dripping; and then - to end this particular enigmatic little sequence - a picture of an immaculate white clapboard house somewhere in Shaker America, a double rainbow in a grey sky haloing its chimneyed roof.

Tillmans admits to taking a very long time over these seemingly random arrangements, as he does over the displays of his work in public museums. At the time of the interview, he had just been given a major, four-museum touring retrospective [check this] – itself some indication of the dizzy heights his reputation has reached in a career spanning little more than a decade – and was working on a dummy installation of around 100 photographs in a specially created scale model of the Frankfurt Kunsthalle [check this] that one of his studio assistants had made. Not many photographers would go to quite that degree of trouble to put their pictures in the right order; and quite a few might well prefer the curators at the museum to do the job for them.  Tillmans gives the impression of being as interested in the sequencing of his images as he is in the creation of each discrete image itself, all of which suggests that there is something of the film director manque about him – not quite so manque, in fact, now that he has actually started directing films, of a kind. It seems like a natural progression for him, although it is probably unlikely that he will ever court a career in popular cinema. Apart from the work in progress about discos and their “light-jockeys”, his principal motion-picture creation so far is a pop video for the Pet Shop Boys’ comeback single, which Tillmans describes with visible pride as “completely, totally, crazily uncommercial.” Its story-line revolves, he says, around the activities of “subway mice”, the rodents who live on scraps inside the tunnels of the Tube. Some kind of mischievous pun on the Pet Shop Boys’ name is presumably intended; but mice have in any case long been one of the more unusual leitmotifs in the photographer’s work. They attract him, perhaps, as a kind of animal metaphor for the types of human subculture to which he seems always to have been drawn.

“I want to capture the beauty of what a lot of other people might not consider beautiful – or that they might find frightening,” he says. The remark is not a bad place to start when trying to find a common thread to his work. It certainly helps to explain the pictures with which he first made his name, photographs taken in and around the clubs of Hamburg in the late 1980s, when he was not long out of school. These came to the attention of the editors of i-D magazine in London, who ran them as lively documents of the contemporary German youth scene: a series of striking images of young men and women, unconventionally clothed (or unclothed), dancing to House music under the influence of Ecstasy and otherwise altering their consciousnesses. A group of people generally demonised in the mainstream press were given back a kind of innocence by Tillmans, who photographed them, wide-eyed and joyful, as if they were the inheritors of the Flower Power movement. He recalls those photographs, and others of a similar kind that followed, as tributes to “an incredibly vibrant scene” which transformed his own life and outlook.

Although many of the pictures had the spontaneous look of snapshots, most were “very elaborately staged”. The fact that even such evidently posed pictures could be mistaken for simple verite used to annoy him although now, he says, it amuses him. His most widely disseminated picture probably remains a photograph taken in 1992 of two of his closest friends sitting on the branches of a tree naked except for plastic macs: “It’s a tribute to the power of photography that people took it simply for something I had seen – as if they just happened to be up in a tree wearing those clothes. It shows the power of the photograph’s documentary associations.” But he was after something other than a picture of the literal truth; he wanted to picture a state of mind. “I wanted to make pictures that made visible certain utopian ideas about togetherness and community, that were very much in the air at the time. We were taking Ecstasy for the first time, and that whole generation shared this enthusiasm when you first take it. It made it seem as if a whole different way of living, a whole different social world, was possible”. Nowadays, he remarks, that particular moment in the past seems like the most fleeting of collective memories. “There had been the Cold War for so long and then with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of Soviet Russia, it seemed suddenly that no one was secretly out to get anyone any more. Of course, it was an illusion. Now we have had September 11, and if that event tells us anything it is that there are plenty of people in the world who don’t want others to have the freedom to choose how they live…”

Many photographers have spoken of the disengagement from experience that they associate with taking pictures – as if photography were a way of stepping back from the world and cultivating an aesthetic of dissociation. But for Tillmans it is plainly anything but that, and despite his generally relaxed demeanour there is a simmering evangelism about his determination to change people’s ideas about what is, or is not, beautiful. “It’s a constant process of trying to infiltrate a public discussion about what is beautiful, what is acceptable, what is possible.” This particular ambition is often expressed in rather understated ways in his work. His still lives are well calculated to offend upholders of a formalist, purist photographic aesthetic. Instead of the perfect glossy peppers carefully arranged under studio lights by such past masters of the photographic canon as Edward Weston, Tillmans takes deliberately “unposed” pictures of fruit as it might appear in some corner of a not terribly tidy kitchen: still wrapped in cellophane, complete with price tag, next to an unwashed plate perhaps or some other piece of detritus. Such pictures seem almost insolently off-the-cuff but are quietly evangelical in their way, part of the wider project of helping people to see the beauty in what they habitually overlook or despise. Pointing to a red rolled-up rubber band loitering next to some tomatoes in one such picture, he says “I think it is like a little sculpture. Why should that be trash?” When asked if he put it into the arrangement his reply is “No, but I consciously didn’t take it out.”

Tillmans takes pleasure in attempting to turn conventional attitudes on their head. He reverses the usual associations of urban and pastoral for example, often making the countryside seem a drab and rather depressing place while presenting the city as a thing of beauty and a joy forever (one of his most self-consciously romantic photographs shows a young man gazing out across city lights in New York, like a modern version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer in the Mists). He is profoundly attracted to the margins and peripheries of life – to urban subcultures as well as objects like cast-off red rubber bands that are on the unacceptable edge of most people’s idea of beauty.

Tillmans’ sympathy for social misfits or outcasts may also reflect his own past experience: some sense that he too may have had of being a bit of a square peg in a round hole. He was brought up in the little town of Remschied, equidistant from Dusseldorf and Cologne. His father was a travelling salesman and exporter of German tools who spent half the year, every other year, away from home. His mother was a politician in the local Conservative party. They were not best pleased when their son Wolfgang decided not to perform his national service in the army, but to do a year’s social work instead (“I washed old people’s bodies and took pictures in my spare time”). But he gets along well with his parents, he says, and although the fact remains that Tillmans has made his home in East London rather than conservative Remschied, his upbringing does seem to have left powerful traces on his work. He was raised as a Lutheran, and although he is not a practising Christian, there does seem to be a powerfully Germanic strain of quasi-religious feeling running through many of his photographs – a sense that what the photographer is really looking for, as he views the urban scene from above, or a wood at night, or a sunstruck cloud glowing above a desert wilderness, is some kind of sign, some kind of connection with a reality larger and more mysterious than that of the everyday. Behind the chic East London façade of the Tillmans studio, and behind the apparent cool of the fashionable contemporary artist, there is an unfashionably profound sense of spiritual yearning.