Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968)

Wolfgang Tillmans’ photographs capture evocative, intimate reflections of often overlooked objects and moments in everyday life. Since the mid-1980s, he has reinterpreted representational genres from portraiture to still life to landscape, and invented a radical presentational approach that engages and brings to the fore the particular dynamics of specific spaces. Indeed his imagery has a distinctive energy, often appearing spontaneous and capturing the essence of the moment.

And yet, his photographs are not random snapshots; they are carefully selected and crafted in order to convey a distinctive way in which to perceive the world around us. In Portishead, Tillmans’ photograph displays well-defined zones of different textures and hues. From the seaweed covered rocks, to the choppy sea and soft cloud-studded sky, Tillmans conceives a well-balanced composition with undeniable painterly qualities. Indeed the punctuation of the orange from the suited fisherman seems to act as an anchor of sorts to the scene, bringing a sort of atonal harmony to an otherwise seemingly banal image. From a distance, the image takes on an abstracted quality of form and colour. Tillmans relishes this in his photography, noting that ‘You are free to use your eyes and attribute value to things the way you want. The eyes are a great subversive tool because they technically don’t underlie any control, they are free when used freely’ (W. Tillmans, quoted in D. Birnbaum, ‘A New visual Register for Our Perceptual Apparatus’, in Wolfgang Tillmans, exh. cat., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 2006, p. 16).