Wolfgang Tillmans
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Wolfgang Tillmans (born August 15, 1968) is a photographer. He has worked for fashion and style magazines as well as showing his work in art galleries.
Born in Remscheid in Germany, Tillmans lived and worked in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s before moving to England. He took a course on photography at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art from 1990 to 1992, and then moved to London.
Even before he moved to England, Tillmans was working for British fashion and style magazines. His work for them was apparently more spontaneous than most magazine photography, often seeming to catch fleeting moments. He typically photographed young people, sometimes clubbers or part of the gay scene, sometimes homeless. His work has often been compared to Nan Goldin who from around the 1980s documented Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City in a similar snapshot aesthetic way.
His initial work led to some degree of fame in the business, and within a couple of years he was photographing people like Moby and Blur's vocalist Damon Albarn in a similar spontaneous style.
Tillmans' photographs are often exhibited clustered together in groups, thus drawing connections between apparently disparate images. In one installation, for example, an image of Concorde sat alongside a picture of some fruit and a photo of Gary Rahill.
As well as his work being shown in a range of places, both fashion magazines and galleries, Tillmans' work also show a wide range of subject matter. Apart from innocent, and what may be seen by many as rather banal, pictures of fruit or a pair of jeans over a bannister, he has photographed nudes and masturbating men. The kind of prints he exhibits also vary - inkjet prints are shown alongside expensive glossy shots and images taken from magazines.
Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000. He has released a book, Burg. His work has been featured in Arto Lindsay's recording The Subtle Body (1995). The same year his photographs were published in a Taschen book Wolfgang Tillmans (with a preface of Simon Watney).
