Wolfgang Tillmans

The book that introduced Wolfgang Tillmans to a general audience, and the one that fixed the loose, unhierarchical way of looking he had been building in magazines since the late 1980s.

Published by Taschen in Cologne in June 1995, edited by Burkhard Riemschneider with a text by Simon Watney, its 176 pages run portraits of friends, pictures made in clubs and at Love Parade, still lifes of clothing and fruit, and landscapes, set beside one another at a level pitch rather than sorted into series. Tillmans had been publishing in i-D and elsewhere for several years, and the book carries that magazine sensibility over into an artist’s monograph: the images are sequenced for rhythm and adjacency, and the everyday is given the same weight as the staged.

Tillmans went on to win the Turner Prize in 2000, the first photographer and the first non-British artist to do so, and his later installations have pushed further into abstraction and camera-less work. This first Taschen volume remains the clearest record of the early practice, and the collection holds three of its companions from the same years: the Portikus Frankfurt catalogue, the Kunsthalle Zürich book, and Hatje Cantz’s Wer Liebe wagt, lebt morgen.