Soldiers: The Nineties

Soldiers: The Nineties is a 1999 artist book in which Wolfgang Tillmans studies how the media shows soldiers, using images he took and collected over a decade.

Regen Projects, Tillmans’s gallery, describes the pictures as servicemen in and out of conflict, in places that include the Persian Gulf, Kosovo and Northern Ireland. Tillmans sorts the men by occupation and sets the differences between their governments aside, so the book asks how depictions of soldiers as a professional group shape public attitudes to war. Climax Books adds that press clippings are compiled in the volume. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König in Cologne published the hardcover, and Tillmans’s bibliography lists it as an artist book edited and designed by him.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid in 1968 and lives and works in Berlin and London. His bibliography records the Turner Prize in 2000. It lists two earlier artist books, Concorde (Walther König, 1997) and Burg (Taschen, 1998), and a 1999 exhibition at Maureen Paley/Interim Art in London titled Space Between Two Buildings/Soldiers: The Nineties.