Born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, Wolfgang Tillmans now lives between London and Berlin. He first discovered the English scene—Boy George, Peter Saville’s New Order album covers, the cheek of trendy magazines like The Face and i-D—during a stay in 1983. Back in Germany he began working for fashion magazines and then, in 1988, with the i-D team under iconoclastic art director Terry Jones. ‘I became a photographer without noticing it’ he says. His fashion and underground press period were the underpinning for the art to come, providing him with the basic principles for a totally original photographic uvre, an expanding image-narrative that broke out of the press format into the three dimensions of the exhibition space. The images he composed, reframed, rearranged, permuted, associated and dissociated in an ever-changing constellation, together with his predilection for inkjet printing and the creative potential of photography, all had their roots in those formative years. The slogans of punk—Do It Yourself, Search & Destroy—show through in the demanding experimental work leading up to the genesis of the uvre: ‘I zoomed into the photographs,’ he explains, ‘dissolving and destroying their surface.’ As he sees it, ‘the image is a good starting point for analysing the world’ and his pictures of the famous and the unknown—including the iconic series devoted to his friends Lutz and Alex, published by i-D in 1992—are a portrait of the post-punk generation; a portrait that combines a distinctive look with a poetically libertarian stance, a search—on the margins, in free parties, in political protest and sex—for a new way of living in society and the world. ‘Maybe,’ he confides, ‘Paradise is when you forget your ego—a loss of self that makes you part of a jumble of other bodies.’ This echoes the potent infra-language of the huddled, entangled figures that often people works like Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christophe on Beach (1993) and make explicit the universal reach of his ambitions as an artist: ‘[If] something seems real it gains in power, because people think it has really happened. I’m looking for authenticity of intention, but I’ve never gone looking for authenticity of subject: I’m looking for a universal truth, but not the truth of any moment in particular.’
