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.

Let me ask you about political engagement in your work. You've included the 2005 piece Truth Study Center here.

Yes. As well as an interesting new piece called Memorial to the Victims of Organized Religion, which, in a town full of memorials, seemed to be the one that was missing. It's a grid of 48 black and very dark blue photographs, each of which is 24- by 20- inches. There is a modified version of the Soldier piece from 1999-2000, which is adapted for today's context.

And the Truth Study Center is here. It's in its own room, with absolutely nothing on the walls, and the 24 tables are arranged in a diagonal to the space. I'm really happy about the sculptural aspects of the piece. I haven't held back on the content either. It's got a whole variety of issues that are of great concern to me, like the South African government's denial that HIV is the cause of AIDS, like the questioning of evolution in America, like holocaust revisionism in some places in Germany. There's a table dedicated to a very recent piece from The Guardian by Naomi Wolf, called "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps."

Have you considered that President Bush might stroll along the Mall and wander in and see your work?

Well, I don't think he'll do that, but I was told that this is the most visited period of the year for the Hirshhorn and because of its location there will be an audience of 200,000 for this show. If some of them stumble across [the political work], it would be very good.

Do you think of yourself as a subversive artist?

I think that intending to be subversive often has the opposite result. But I am interested in reversing thoughts and questioning assumptions, which of course is subversive, because the hardest thing for all of us is to change our point of view, or to change our behavior.

I want to be very aware of how my mind functions, and to play with expectations.

The most fundamental truth is that things are not always what they seem. It's important to think twice, and to look twice. That is [what I consider] subversive.

Another term that's often used in discussions of your work is the "snapshot aesthetic." I wonder how difficult it is to create the appearance of spontaneity?

Here's the thing that I don't like about the word "snapshot." There's a suggestion that it's about not caring, about not knowing. I like the way noncritics and nonprofessionals use the word. They use it to suggest intimacy and things that they love—because people take snapshots of things and people they love. I like the immediacy and closeness in that sense of the word.

I learned at an early stage that it was much easier to make something look complicated and arty. But to make a picture enter your consciousness on a different level, it's better if it looks very simple and doesn't talk so much about its own artifice and processes. I've developed ways to take pictures so that you don't notice how it's been lit, for example. The process doesn't exactly disappear—when you look at the picture you realize that the colors are very specific, and the geometry, and the lines, and how things are composed are still there. I don't want to make these things disappear completely, but I want to avoid a language that points them out.