Wolfgang Tillmans remembers the exact date he first saw a total lunar eclipse: 16 September 1978. He was ten, and had recently received his first “cheap little” telescope as a birthday present. Through it, he watched as the moon moved into the Earth’s shadow. “Astronomy was my first love in life,” he said. “I see it now as my initiation to learning about the importance of careful observation… questioning what I see, and what do I want to see? Astronomy is really about seeing at the verge of visibility. Is this actually a celestial nebula, a phenomenon, or is it just a little blur in your eye? Is it a grain in the film, or is it a star?”
Tillmans, now 55, became an artist rather than an astronomer. But this “sense of locating myself within the solar system” remains fundamental to his practice. The photographer, who was born in Remscheid, western Germany, was speaking in the plant- and poster-filled kitchen of his Berlin studio. It was a snowy December evening and he had arrived in a bright green puffer coat, clasping a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. Now he sat in a multi-coloured hoodie, with glasses of non-alcoholic beer and an apple-flavoured soft drink on the table in front of him.
Tillmans lived in Hamburg before moving to Bournemouth to study in 1990. He then lived briefly in New York before finding a home in London. “I’ve always taken myself very seriously and at the same time I had a sense for absurdity and humour,” he said, with one of his frequent, boyish smiles. He read existentialist French authors such as Albert Camus, while also “putting on make-up in the toilets in Victoria station and loving Culture Club”. This mix of playfulness and sincerity merge in his photography, with which he made his name in the early Nineties via editorial shoots in i-D and Spex. In Lutz and Alex sitting in the trees (1992) two of Tillmans’ friends sit atop branches, naked except for open overcoats. It’s both a quirky image from a fashion shoot and a slyly provocative questioning of what we consider “natural”. By the late Nineties Tillmans was exhibiting regularly throughout Europe and the US, and in 2000 he became both the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the Turner Prize.
It is not easy to trace a clear, chronological development in Tillmans’ artistic work – and you get the sense that he doesn’t want you to try. He is fed up, for example, of people asking him about the two days he spent photographing Kate Moss for Vogue in 1996, preferring instead to discuss the artistic process behind his less glamorous shots, such as Weed, which he took in a London courtyard in 2014, or Rat on Trash Bags, which he took in New York City in 1995.
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