MIND MAPPING
With his photographs featuring everywhere from magazines to galleries, photographer-artist Wolfgang Tillmans is blurring the line between photography and art. His work with fashion, portraiture and abstract material objects are all on view at his latest e
‘The meaning of clothes has always interested me — how could it not when I am interested in people and people, on average, cover about 90% of their body with clothes. Clothes are the membrane between us and the outside world, that’s how we communicate’ WOLFGANG TILLMANS
When did you first pick up a camera?
It’s funny because photography is the last medium I picked up. In my teens I was painting and drawing and making music in a band and I even made clothes. Then I discovered a photocopier that I started to make artwork with, and only after needing more photographs to manipulate with a photocopier did I buy a camera. And so only by accident, really, did I learn that I could speak best with a camera.
What were your first photographs like?
I started taking portraits of people around me looking at the camera and not apologising for who they are. They weren’t making a funny gesture and I didn’t photograph them with crazy light or wide angles, it was just the person at peace and in struggle with themselves at the same time. You know, this co-existence of resting in oneself ... being aware of one’s own fragility and on the other hand resilience and wanting to take charge and shape life and community. This is the place where I see myself ... it’s that duality I want to touch on in the viewer.
Why did you start working for magazines?
From college I recognised magazines as a great medium to communicate, and also a gallery as a great place because it’s such a pure place where you have the undivided attention of the visitor. But it was a deliberate decision to want to be in magazines as an artist. I’ve always been more interested in clothes rather than labels. The meaning of clothes has always interested me — how could it not when I am interested in people and people, on average, cover about 90% of their body with clothes. Clothes are the membrane between us and the outside world, that’s how we communicate, to a large extent.
How has your work changed over the years?
In the late ’90s I arrived at a point where I questioned myself and questioned general picture culture. I was thinking, why do we need more pictures of young people’s lives? It seems like a question that was 20 years premature, but I felt it already back then because there was this explosion of small compact cameras, and magazines suddenly being interested in young people. So I started to experiment with photography without the lens in the darkroom, by manipulating light and colour in the darkness onto photographic paper ... I spent the 2000s working on these abstract pictures but also studies of paper itself. Then about 10 years ago I had the desire to get involved in life again and see how the world has changed 20 years on since I started.
What are your thoughts on the crossover between art and photography?
The special thing about photography is that it can be so many things. I have always loved art and I wanted to make art and I realised that I don’t have to paint my pictures. Instead, I wanted to work with them as objects and as something beautiful in their own right because of the paper quality that they have. You know, a canvas has a beautiful quality, how it is stretched around wood, but I like how these sheets of paper hang and fall and bend and curl, there is a material beauty to that.
Tell us about your exhibition, “Fragile”.
“Fragile” is representative of who I am as a person and my interests and how I think, particularly how I think about material, and this connection of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects and how they get translated onto two-dimensional paper. Together, all the papers in this room make a three-dimensional experience that you can move around in and explore. So naturally, this is a kind of map of my mind, but it’s actually quite the opposite of this Instagram impulse and of social media and blogging, where people say I did this and I did that in sort of diary posting. Instead, I see these pictures as stand-ins for X amount of similar situations that other people could experience or see themselves.
‘Fragile’ by Wolfgang Tillmans is at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until September 30