Freischwimmer

Freischwimmer is the catalogue for Wolfgang Tillmans's 2004 exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, published bilingually in English and Japanese by the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation.

The 136-page softcover, measuring roughly 18.7 by 25.5 cm, carries texts by Shimizu Minoru and Iida Shihoko alongside a reprinted interview with Gil Blank. It takes its title from Freischwimmer, the name Tillmans gave to a group of works made without a camera by letting light act directly on photographic paper in the darkroom.

Those camera-less abstractions, which Tillmans began developing in the early 2000s alongside pieces such as Blushes and Mental Pictures, now sit next to his figurative photography as a second track in his practice, abstract images made from the material of photography itself rather than a depicted subject.