Wolfgang Tillmans

Phaidon's 2002 monograph on Wolfgang Tillmans, issued two years after he won the Turner Prize, surveys his work across genres, from figurative pictures to abstraction.

The 160-page paperback in the Contemporary Artists series draws on several kinds of text. The critic Jan Verwoert writes the survey essay. The artist and theorist Peter Halley talks with Tillmans about his move from young photographer of the mid-1990s to established figure. The critic and curator Midori Matsui reads the Concorde installation project in a focus section. The Artist's Choice section reprints a text on divine inspiration by the nineteenth-century Quaker writer Caroline Stephen, and Tillmans contributes diary entries, installation text fragments and project notes. Large colour photographs run throughout.

Tillmans was born in Remscheid in 1968 and studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. His pictures of youth culture and the club scene appeared in i-D and Spex in the early 1990s. Concorde Grid (1997) is 56 photographs of equal size shot around London, and the Silver works, begun in 1998, record how photographic paper reacts to light. He lives between Berlin and London. Phaidon later issued a revised and expanded edition in 2013, which the library catalogues separately.