To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos. Wolfgang Tillmans More Quotes by Wolfgang Tillmans More Quotes From Wolfgang Tillmans This act of piss, which can be considered sexual by some, a pleasurable experience, is at the same time total disrespect. I had once asked a friend to do this picture and he totally refused. So I carried the idea around with me for years. When I was invited to do a Honcho shoot, I approached Phillip, who was the barman at The London Apprentice, and fortunately he knew who I was. He had a copy of my first book, and that broke the ice. At the end of the shoot with him, I realized I could ask him to do this picture. I had waited four years to do it. Wolfgang Tillmans broke disrespect book Boy George of course, was my idol as a teenager. I haven't photographed him, even though I know him now. He wants the pictures to be retouched, and I don't want that. Wolfgang Tillmans teenager boys I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of. Wolfgang Tillmans tired people I find fashion magazines so incredibly boring . . . There still is no new photography and no new concerns. Wolfgang Tillmans boring fashion photography On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don't see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus. Wolfgang Tillmans exercise hands reality Now there is such a closed loop between realness and commercialism that one has to question why do more and more and more of those pictures. It's almost like everybody deserves a book about themselves, and everybody deserves a whole issue of Vice magazine devoted to them. Wolfgang Tillmans realness deserve book I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There's always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted. Wolfgang Tillmans eye brain reality I always think that we know so much more than one would have ever known before. But I don't know if that's really true. Wolfgang Tillmans really-true thinking For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real. Wolfgang Tillmans powerful photography real Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That's why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in '92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today. Wolfgang Tillmans party photography mean This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe coming closer together, and nightlife and techno and ecstasy culture seemed like a very powerful panEuropean movement. Wolfgang Tillmans wall powerful fall The picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done. Wolfgang Tillmans absurd guy done Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure. Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary. Wolfgang Tillmans done mean book The original interest in making pictures that don't directly depict came around '97 or '98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me. Wolfgang Tillmans photography trying world In order to engage in an 'experiencing of the world,' one has to physically move oneself to the most diverse places on earth. Wolfgang Tillmans places oneself earth world When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol. Wolfgang Tillmans like me growing-up art It's very real, the narrow line between a night danced away and the potential of death around the corner. Wolfgang Tillmans potential real night death
