Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘In photography I like to assume the unprivileged position, the position everybody can take’

Born in the industrial town of Remscheid in West Germany in 1968, Wolfgang Tillmans took his earliest photographs of the night sky. In 1982, he was sent to London to improve his English, where, he said, his aim was to ‘go clubbing and meet outrageous people and break out and wear make-up’. In Kensington Market he discovered the New Romantics, the nascent teenage style cult that gave rise to Boy George, Steve Strange and a host of arty kids who partied at the Blitz club in Covent Garden. British pop music was to have a profound influence on the photographer.

Tillmans dates his conception as an artist to 1986, when he discovered a Canon laser photocopier in a copy shop in his home town. He thought of the photocopier as a camera in its own right, using it to enlarge and reproduce images he found in newspapers and magazines, as well as his own photographs.

Two years later, he moved to Hamburg and began documenting the city’s nightlife, sending the images to the British fashion magazine i-D. This led to his first exhibition, at Café Gnosa, a bohemian coffee shop with a small gallery space. The positive reception to the show emboldened Tillmans to approach the London gallerist Maureen Paley, who has represented him ever since.

Tillmans’s pictures first appeared in the pages of i-D in 1989. The style and culture magazine’s appropriation of the zine format, its commitment to experimentation and its promotion of sub-cultures made it a perfect vehicle for a teenage artist who was intent on exploring the meaning and context of his images. Soon, Tillmans was being asked to photograph musicians, actors and models who embodied the new counter-culture, such as Kate Moss and Moby, and he produced photo stories about club culture in Europe.

In 1992, Tillmans photographed his friends, the artist Alexandra Bircken and the fashion designer Lutz Huelle, naked or semi-clothed on the Dorset coast for i-D’s ‘Sexuality Issue’. The magazine’s UK distributors refused to stock the issue because of its explicit content, but Lutz & Alex holding cock and Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees have become some of Tillmans’s most recognisable photographs. The latter in particular became a defining, if utopian, vision of the free-spirited and open-minded generation the artist sought to portray following the fall of the Soviet Union.

By the early 1990s, having graduated from Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, Tillmans was showing in galleries in London, Hamburg and Cologne, using the white cube space to challenge perceived notions of what art could be. He exhibited faxes, postcards and printed-up darkroom mistakes, and worked across different artistic genres including still life, landscape, portraiture and abstraction.

‘I found my signature in terms of showing my pictures in a non-hierarchical way,’ he said of the period. ‘It was a very radical thing at the time, to show magazine pages alongside original photographs and to leave the photographs unframed.’

When asked about how he works and what’s important to him, Tillmans has spoken of ‘being open to what’s there and working in this intersection, interplay of intention and chance, control and coincidence’. Operating on the border between photography and painting, he has frequently been compared with Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

Tillmans’s in-depth exploration of the abstract potential of photography began with a group of non-representational works, of which Urgency XIX is one. Using different light sources on light-sensitive paper, the results invoke radiant sunsets and the depths of the ocean in their drama and scale. The blurry lines carry blemishes like broken blood vessels, as if revealing a whole world to be found under a microscope.

‘These pictures were essentially made “dry” — only with light and my hands,’ he explains. ‘Created in the darkroom without negative and without camera, they’re made purely through the manipulation of light on paper. In this respect, their own reality, their creation and their time are absolutely central to their meaning: the time that I spend with the material in which I explore and intensify different effects.’

Tillmans is often described as an artist who makes ordinary things look extraordinary, although he would argue the opposite: he believes that ordinary things are extraordinary, if only people would take the time to look at them.

This hyper-awareness of the world around him is something he attributes to his own sense of mortality. He grew up in the 1980s under the shadow of HIV, and his lover, the painter Jochen Klein, died from AIDS-related complications in 1997. Tillmans’s pictures, however light and joyous, are always made with that reality in mind. The artist gives the impression of being a casual observer of life, but this is an illusion — that casualness is hard-won. All his photographs are carefully considered, and little is left to chance.

Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000 for an installation of photographs arranged on the gallery walls, an unpretentious aesthetic that he has continued. At the time of his win, the press described him as ‘a German-born artist living in Britain’ — a bit of a mouthful, but a label that he has often used.

His exhibition at Tate Britain three years later was titled if one thing matters, everything matters and reflected his egalitarian vision. ‘In photography I like to assume exactly the unprivileged position,’ he said, ‘the position everybody can take, who chooses to sit at an airplane window or chooses to climb a tower.’

In 2006, Tillmans founded Between Bridges, a not-for-profit exhibition space in Bethnal Green, east London, which relocated to Berlin in 2014. It is now a foundation devoted to the advancement of democracy, international understanding, the arts and LGBT rights. The foundation has been vocal in its support for the European Union. ‘It’s now the duty of us all,’ wrote Tillmans, ‘to defend the pillars of the free world order that was created over the last 70 years.’

In 2017, Tillmans paid homage to his early New Romantic days by dedicating an entire room in his Tate Modern retrospective to the 1980s British pop pioneers Colourbox. More recently, he has been producing music of his own.

Tillmans released his debut electronic album, Moon in Earthlight, in 2021, followed three years later by his second, Build from Here. The artist’s move into synth-pop is not as surprising as it might seem, given his love of electronic music and clubbing. In fact, he once said he would never have picked up a camera had it not been for Acid House: he wanted to bear witness to the euphoria he and his friends were experiencing at the time.

The latest album, with its experimental ‘audio photography’ and beautiful melodies, reflects something of Tillmans’s optimistic nature and faith in the future.

Christie’s exhibition, Wolfgang Tillmans: The Way We Look, is on show in London until 21 February 2025. Post-War and Contemporary Art Online is open for bidding from 26 February until 12 March 2025. The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale takes place on 6 March 2025

All artworks: Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York