Wolfgang Tillmans at the Serpentine Gallery.

Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the most eclectic and intriguing of modern photographers. Surveying the heterogeneous images gathered together in his new show at the Serpentine, it seems that almost anything could furnish him with material for a picture: empty plastic fruit punnets clustered on a windowsill; the disc of Venus crossing the orb of the sun; a boy in leisurewear standing on the deck of a ship, talking on his mobile phone; a sad-faced William of Orange looking out from a fragment of seventeenth-century portrait, light flaring on the canvas; two dismantled office chairs, seatless and backless, in a stark white room. Tillmans’ images jump erratically from the macrocosmic to the microcsosmic, from the sublime to the mundane, from the urban to the pastoral, with disconcerting rapidity. To enhance the unsettling effect of the whole installation, the pictures themselves are printed in widely varying sizes, from monumental scale to the size of a postage stamp.

These scatterfire images are displayed in a consideredly offhand way, simply pinned or stuck to the wall in multiple configurations. Some of the hangs look as if they might have been inspired by the jumbled shapes in a kaleidoscope. The images themselves often look overexposed or underexposed and frequently exhibit the imperfections to which the photographic process itself is prone: scratches, traces of grit on or in the lens, speckles or fading. This is an exhibition liable to raise the hackles of photographic purists. But a kind of preciousness is implied, nonetheless, by this apparent absence of preciousness. Imperfections and all, these images aggressively declare that the photographer’s own eye and mind are all that counts. The show is presented as a sensorium rather than an exhibition – the flow of a life – in which the photographs...

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