E-Paper
Paroma Mukherjee, Head, National Photography Desk, picks her favourite read of 2020
Relaying difficult social experiences
German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’ early portraits of artist friends and fashion designers made him a generation favourite among photographers, including myself. His first book, published in 1995, was a slick, rhythmic tapestry of cityscapes, illustrations and snapshots of underground youth culture. He was the first photographer to be awarded the prestigious Turner Prize and some months ago, Taschen published Four Books, a compact near-retrospective of Tillmans’ work. His first book, the self-titled Burg (1998), Truth Study Center (2005) and Neue Welt (2012) come together in one big abridged version with some new additions. His early work was influenced by the form of the diptych and while Four Books retains original layouts of the books that it houses, it’s actually a great insight into Tillmans’ growth as an artist because of the chronology of his work through the decades. Even in his early photographs, there were no claims of anything being a single, essential truth, thus steering his visual language clear of any genre in particular. What did become evident through the decades, and in this new book, is that Tillmans was relaying social experience, and a difficult one at that, through his own found and made images.
Since the past couple of years, Tillmans’ political activism, that came to the fore with the start of Brexit, became a campaign of sorts. He has spoken openly about it apart from creating slogans, posters and T-shirts for a variety of events. Perhaps the predecessor to this was his installation and 2005 book Truth Study Center a visual exploration of the impossibility of our desire to find a universal truth. There’s a definite movement towards technology and the abstractness of urban life in all its hypermodernity in the last book, and Tillmans’ fine editing of his own explosive work that’s stacked up, layered one on top of the other, almost moving rapidly, is remarkable because the photographer is now rarely absent.
