WT: That is right. But I don’t photograph with a conscious wish to paint a picture with the camera. It’s because I see that way. I see the pictures; they are right in front of me. I don’t seek out what looks painterly, and I don’t try to make my pictures look like paintings. That . . .
IG: . . . just happens.
WT: My photographs are first and foremost pictures. And in that respect my frame of reference obviously includes more than just the 150 years of photographic picture making. I don’t think in media-specific categories. I think first of all, “A field of color is a field of color.”
Wolfgang Tillmans, Tony Blair, 2005, color photograph.
IG: I also find your pictures quite classical.
WT: I have always consciously downplayed the classical so that it doesn’t look as if I wanted it to be painting. I love photography and am very comfortable with it; I find it liberating as a practice. Even the abstracts are assuredly photographic.
IG: Well, how’s your work going, anyway?
WT: Good! Last summer was really liberating because of the spontaneous decision to spend it in Berlin. Suddenly I had the feeling that a new time in my work had started. It’s not that I changed something radically, but continuing had become possible. And with truth study center [Taschen, 2005], the new book which occupied me on and off for an entire year, this process has reached some closure—just as the first book ten years ago was a point of closure so that I could do something new or, more precisely, could carry on. I don’t mean closure in a negative way—it’s more like capturing the feeling of being alive. You have to do that while the feeling lasts. With the first book I felt the urgency to condense into one volume what I felt during the early ’90s. At the time my friends said, “You are crazy to put out a big book with Taschen at the age of twenty-six.” But for me it was necessary because I knew this was the here-and-now and the power to catch what it feels like today may go tomorrow. In that sense the last year felt similar, and that’s what I aimed to capture in the new book.
IG: Do you have it with you?
WT: Yes, as photocopies.[Takes them out.]
IG: Wow, it’s fabulous; very nice.
WT: The most important thing was that there simply be a reason for a new book, and that it feel new. In it, I’m attempting an ordered examination of social surfaces—world and nature—and at the same time, the pictures are arranged in groups and chapters, although these are not named. As far as the energy is concerned, a lot harks back to my beginnings, although in a different form. Having done several books that treat the pictures in a more precious way gave me the freedom to go full circle in the new book, to pursue a certain flow that’s similar to that in the first one.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Sheet One, 2001, color photograph, dimensions variable.
IG: Who is that?
WT: That is Conor, who was my assistant for three years, and who was very important in my life.
IG: This woman also seems familiar.
WT: Irm Hermann, the actress in Fassbinder’s films.
IG: Oh yes! And I’m represented here as well. Who’s that? He also seems familiar.
WT: Tony Blair. [Laughs.]
IG: Of course. [Laughs.] I wouldn’t have guessed it right now.
WT: This is in Cologne at the Diözesanmuseum. The Trinity.
IG: Does it really look like that? No double exposure or anything?
WT: No. It’s a medieval woodcarving.
IG: Amazing.
WT: And this was the staircase to my apartment in London.
IG: Not bad.
WT: Red carpet!
IG: It’ll be quite a volume. I like the rhythm.
WT: Well, that’s the world as I see it—right now, anyway.
IG: One will look at the book repeatedly, most likely. It is contemplative. No layout in the sense . . .
Isa Genzken and Wolfgang Tillmans, Science Fiction/Hier und jetzt zufrieden sein (Science Fiction/To Be Content Here and Now),2001. Installation view, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2003. Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans.
WT: People sometimes ask why my books don’t more directly reflect the layouts of my installations, but they are two completely different things! When you put pictures together on pages, it has nothing to do with viewing them in a room, where you can approach the pictures in the space.
IG: I could look at it again straight away.
WT: Yes, that is the most important thing, that the work also goes on. That one doesn’t just slow down.
IG: That, I think, is not possible in your case. You always have to ask yourself, “When did I start? And where am I now?”
WT: That is really the thing. At the beginning of the ’90s, I always thought, “In which city do the things happen that are best for me? Booze or no booze? In love or not in love? Unhappy or happy?” And the hard truth is that ninety percent of it lies within you. You can’t just get the stuff from outside. There is never a method. The method is always right or wrong at this or that moment, but you can’t generalize it.
IG: I’ve also noticed that with my things. For a long time, I went about my work very conceptually. With the hi-fi photographs, ellipsoids, or with the works made of concrete, I had an idea and realized it forcefully. Then I stopped doing that suddenly, and a new phase started: Just go ahead. And yet the rigor of all those earlier years is still in me. Now I have slowly reached the point where I can say I want to do something again that I think about very clearly. I know now that I can do the other thing, too. But I slowly have to return to that which is thought through very carefully. That will be the next step. And it will once again look completely different from everything before. That is an automatic process. That is what I meant when I talked about artists who work according to a principle. How something has to be. I don’t really have that at all. And I like it that way, actually. . . . Keep mixing things up!
Translated from German by Wilhelm Werthern (with Brian Currid).
