Wolfgang Tillmans

NEW YORK—Wolfgang Tillmans is one of the most popular, influential, and widely discussed contemporary photographers. He was born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, but he has spent most of his working life in London, and in 2000 he was awarded the Turner Prize. He is celebrated for the disconcerting range of his subject matter, which includes portraits, still lifes, landscapes, pure abstractions, documents of youth culture, and what appear to be random snapshots. And he presents his work in an equally wide-ranging fashion: images can be taped or pinned to the wall and appear in all sorts of sizes and positions; they can be laid out on tables or framed; they sometimes hang adjacent to photocopies. Politics, sex, beauty, and squalor float in and out of his pictures, creating an ambiguous tone that feels altogether contemporary.

Last year Tillmans showed Freedom from the Known at PS1, and a major mid-career retrospective began an American tour. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Wolfgang Tillmans is currently at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (through August 12). The artist spoke to ARTINFO while he was completing the installation at the Hirshhorn.

Wolfgang, despite the long tradition of photography in Germany, in 1990 you chose to base yourself in England. Why was that?

I fell in love with England and with London when I was there on a language trip when I was 14. That coincided with me discovering Culture Club and the New Romantics and the whole of street culture. And the language and everything else speaks to me. But I don't think I'll ever lose my German-ness. You never lose the culture that you're from. England worked very well as an antidote to my German-ness. It's a good combination for me.

You also chose to follow an English photography education?

I guess that it's fortunate that I did. I'm very happy in hindsight that I didn't end up in a five- or six-year-long course in Germany, and did a two-year course in Bournemouth instead. I had already begun to formulate my language when I was pretty young and I wanted to get out there—I wanted to do things. I sometimes think that English education is too focused on getting out there, but in my case it was a very particular situation. I was an artist, but I was doing an odd vocational course that was run like an art course, except that you didn't have the weight around your neck that everything you did was an important fine-art thing. It was a very fortunate situation.

I have the sense that your time at Bournemouth was aimed primarily at picking up skills.

No, I didn't learn skills. Well, I learned color printing—that's the only major thing that's still present in my work today. A lot of things came from that, but that's the only skill that I learned. Otherwise I consider myself self-taught.

The Hirshhorn show is the third time you've hung this retrospective. Has it been different each time?

Each hanging is a reflection on the city, on my history in the city, on the space, and of course on what I have decided the show should be. This version in Washington is not a completely new show, but it's quite different from the other two.

Every bit as interesting as the different ways you display your work is the wide range of your subject matter and picture formats. How do you decide what to include and what to leave out?

There's a superficial misconception that I have an all-encompassing subject matter. [In fact], it is not everything and anything in this world that I photograph. There are actually very consistent themes—some of them going back 16 or 17 years—and whenever I see something that I haven't seen exactly that way before, that enables me to take a new picture. Like a drapery picture or a still life—I can't produce more of those at will. It's the same with portraiture. There has to be a new interest in something, or a new perspective. Like most people, I can't accelerate it. It comes out of a natural progression. It's a slow and measured process, and because I don't work in obvious bodies of work—two years on this, two years on that—it seems to have a much wider variety.