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PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 12 in. / 304 pgs / 200 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of stock indefinitely

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 48   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783775743297 TRADE
List Price: $85.00 CDN $112.50

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
NA LA

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Basel, Switzerland
Fondation Beyeler, 05/28/17–10/01/17

"From early images of socks drying on a radiator to more recent fields of glossy color created in the darkroom, all Tillmans' work asks this question: how to make it new?" -The Guardian

  

HATJE CANTZ

Wolfgang Tillmans

Text by Theodora Vischer, et al.

Wolfgang Tillmans

"From early images of socks drying on a radiator to more recent fields of glossy color created in the darkroom, all Tillmans' work asks this question: how to make it new?" -The Guardian

This publication accompanies Fondation Beyeler’s survey on the great photographic innovator Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968). Tillmans first made a name for himself in the early 1990s, with photographs that captured an entire generation and a youth culture of which he was part, and which are now iconic images of that era. However, he quickly expanded his focus, creating works with and without a camera, producing photographs printed as C-prints on photographic paper, as inkjet prints on paper, or as photocopies. Some of these photographs acquire a sculptural, objectlike quality. Tillmans has also developed new compositional and formal, anti-hierarchical ways of installing his pictures in spaces. This substantial, clothbound volume offers a comprehensive overview of his achievements.

Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) began his career in photography documenting Hamburg’s rave scene in the late 1980s. His earliest images were printed on digital copiers, and in the mid-1990s, living in London and then New York, Tillmans began to foreground the lo-fi properties of his printed images by exhibiting them pinned or taped to gallery walls. In 2005, at an exhibition at Maureen Paley gallery titled Truth Study Center, he further extended this approach by exhibiting photographs alongside newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and other kinds of printed matter, on custom-made wooden vitrines. This installation also brought to the fore more political themes in Tillmans’ photography. In 2011 he traveled to Haiti to document reconstruction efforts following the previous year’s earthquakes.


Featured image is reproduced from, 'Wolfgang Tillmans.'

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

L'Oeil de la Photographie

Ela Kotkowska

To step into the universe of Wolfgang Tillmans is to find oneself in the middle of a conversation; it is to ask questions and be questioned in turn.

Art News

Andrew Russeth

I feel lucky to be alive during the time that Wolfgang Tillmans is making art … Tillmans has been such a consistently inventive and influential artist.

Cultured

Wolfgang Tillmans culls the beauty out of the mundane. His photography’s success is a testament to the value of perspective.

Wolfgang Tillmans

STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.

FROM THE BOOK
Excerpt from a 2004 interview with Gil Blank from ‘Influence Magazine’

Gil Blank: What’s the basic motivation for your photographic portraiture? Is it at all distinct from the remarkably wide variety of other subjects you seek out?

Wolfgang Tillmans: When I began to define my portraiture, in 1990 to 1991, I wanted to communicate both the feelings I had for my contemporaries as well as the sense I often had of a single person. I wanted to communicate the complexity of that person in its entirety, that lack of a singular reading. I wanted to channel the multilayered character of a personality and its contradictions, the way it’s revealed
in clothes, in styles, in attitudes, and the way a person lives. It’s the fractured reality of identity that fascinates me. I didn’t feel myself well represented in the late-eighties media as I was growing up. Perhaps
I did in some magazines like i-D, but everything else depicted people making odd gestures, or acting crazily, or smiling. They were always apologizing for being the way they were, always giving a single reading of their mood, of what they were about. It took me a while to get my own photography of people in line with the way I saw people. That happened around 1991, when I realized that I needed to strip all the pictorial devices away, so that the subjects wouldn’t have to apologize for who they were, and the picture wouldn’t have to justify its observation. It wouldn’t hint at being more of an artifice than necessary. I got rid of everything that’s artistic in portraiture: interesting lighning, recognizably “special” techniques, and all the different styles that divide us from the subject and are usually considered to be enhancements of the subject of the picture. I found a way of indirect lighting that looks like the absence of artificial light. That’s often been misunderstood. [...] A lot of them are just given to you when you make yourself open and vulnerable to the human exchange that takes place in the photographic situation. That’s how I try to negotiate a portrait. The desire to control the result, to come away with an interesting image, is simultaneous with the admission that I’m not in fact completely in control of it. Ultimately, I have to be as weak as the subject, or as strong. If I go into the situation with a preconceived idea, then I’ll limit the human experience that I might be able to have. The outcome of such a situation is unknowable, and that’s something very hard to bear; people prefer to know that what they do will have a good result. I’ve possibly developed the faith or strength of letting myself fall each time. I risk not knowing what might come out, and I also risk making an important work. That’s what I like about the magazine portraiture that I’ve been doing now for fifteen years. It always sends me back to the zero point of human interaction, the point of not knowing. I know that I’m likely to make a printable picture, but I’m not forced to make an artwork. And I quite like that, that I have no responsibility to the sitter or anything beyond the act itself.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS MONOGRAPHS + ARTIST'S BOOKS

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: TO LOOK WITHOUT FEAR

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ISBN: 9781633451117
USD $75.00
| CAN $102

Pub Date: 8/30/2022
Active | In stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: Sound Is Liquid

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: SOUND IS LIQUID

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783753301372
USD $55.00
| CAN $75

Pub Date: 6/7/2022
Active | Out of stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: A READER

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

ISBN: 9781633451124
USD $45.00
| CAN $60

Pub Date: 2/8/2022
Active | In stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: Saturated Light (Silver Works)

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: SATURATED LIGHT (SILVER WORKS)

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783960989523
USD $59.95
| CAN $81.95

Pub Date: 7/20/2021
Active | In stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: Today Is the First Day

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783960987543
USD $39.95
| CAN $55.95

Pub Date: 4/14/2020
Active | Out of stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: Concorde

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: CONCORDE

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783960981671
USD $30.00
| CAN $40

Pub Date: 9/26/2017
Active | Out of stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: Conor Donlon

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: CONOR DONLON

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783863359416
USD $29.95
| CAN $39.95

Pub Date: 9/27/2016
Active | In stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: What’s Wrong with Redistribution?

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: WHAT’S WRONG WITH REDISTRIBUTION?

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783863358228
USD $65.00
| CAN $87

Pub Date: 1/26/2016
Active | In stock


Wolfgang Tillmans: The Cars

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: THE CARS

Walther König, Köln

ISBN: 9783863357528
USD $30.00
| CAN $40

Pub Date: 9/29/2015
Active | Out of stock