Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, you can continue to pretend to understand conceptual art while you drink cheap champagne at openings, but while you debate the nuances of a white canvas, Wolfgang Tillmans has radically redefined what it means to look at the world. Yes, look really. For Tillmans has never been afraid to fix his lens on what we would prefer to ignore, naked bodies, clubs after the party, the traces of ordinary life that we sweep under the rug of our policed existence.
Born in 1968 in Remscheid, in a Germany still divided by a wall, a perfect symbol of our collective inability to see beyond our own constructions, Tillmans has developed a photographic vision that escapes any easy categorization. His seemingly random photographs, often hung without frames using adhesive tape or clips, defy the traditional preciousness of photographic art and force us to question why certain images deserve our attention and others do not.
Let’s face it: Tillmans practices a particular form of visual alchemy. No, it’s not about mystical transmutation, but rather a form of sensory transformation where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Take “Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), this now iconic image of two people perched on tree branches, naked under their open raincoats. The image immediately evokes the myth of Adam and Eve after the fall, but in a contemporary version where shame has no place, where androgynous bodies reveal a new form of self-aware innocence.
This photograph brings to mind the thoughts of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the body as a site of power and resistance. When Foucault analyzed how the body becomes a political battlefield, he anticipated exactly what Tillmans would visually capture decades later [1]. In his photographs of naked bodies, clubs, demonstrations for LGBT rights, Tillmans does not merely document, he realizes what Foucault theorized: a form of resistance through visibility. “Sexuality is part of our behavior. It is part of our freedom in this world,” wrote Foucault, as if these words were destined to become the unwritten manifesto of Tillmans’ work.
Tillmans’ vision is not that of a voyeur, but of a participant who understands that seeing, truly seeing, is a political act. When he photographs lovers kissing in a club like in “The Cock (kiss)” (2002), or when he documents spaces after a party like in “wake” (2001), he is not seeking the spectacular but the authenticity of a fully experienced moment. Foucault reminded us that “visibility is a trap,” and yet, Tillmans brilliantly turns this trap against itself, transforming visibility into a tool of emancipation.
Tillmans’ work transcends mere documentation to achieve a form of visual epistemology, a theory of knowledge based on what we choose to see and how we see it. When Foucault spoke of “the eye of power,” he described how our gaze is conditioned by the dominant social structures. Tillmans, with his installations where traditional hierarchies are abolished, where a small photo of an intimate detail can coexist equally with a large abstract image, directly defies these structures of visual power.
The series “Freischwimmer” or “Silver”, with their abstractions created without a camera, by direct manipulation of photosensitive paper and chemicals, perfectly illustrate Tillmans’ will to question not only what we see, but how we see it. These works do not represent anything identifiable and yet, they manage to evoke bodily sensations, fluids, movements, as if Tillmans had found a way to photograph not the appearance of things, but their very essence.
And what about his “Truth Study Center” project, where he juxtaposes his own images with newspaper clippings, scientific reports or political documents? Is this not a direct application of what Foucault called the archaeology of knowledge, this method of analysis which seeks to unearth the hidden structures that inform our understanding of the world? Tillmans does not merely critique the media or politics, he creates a device that allows us to visualize the regimes of truth that shape our perception of reality.
But to see Tillmans solely through the Foucauldian prism would be a mistake. His work also strikingly dialogues with the thoughts of Henri Lefebvre on the production of space. Lefebvre, this French Marxist thinker who revolutionized our understanding of urban and social space, would have recognized in Tillmans an unexpected ally. For when Tillmans photographs architecture, as in his “Book for Architects” project, he is not interested solely in buildings, but in the way spaces are experienced, perceived and conceived [2].
Lefebvre distinguished three dimensions of social space: perceived space (spatial practice), conceived space (representations of space) and lived space (spaces of representation). Tillmans’ photographs constantly traverse these three dimensions. Take his images of clubs like “Lights (Body)” (2000-2002), where the empty dance floor, with its strobe lights and shadows, evokes all the intensity of a collective bodily experience without even showing a single dancer. This is precisely what Lefebvre called lived space, a space charged with imagination and symbolism.
“Space is not a scientific object separate from ideology or politics,” wrote Lefebvre in “The Production of Space” (1974). “It has always been political and strategic.” Tillmans seems to have internalized this vision when he photographs borders, airports, government buildings. His images of the Concorde, this symbol of technological progress and privileged mobility, or his photographs of the border area of Lampedusa, where migrants risk their lives to reach Europe, are direct visual commentaries on the politics of space.
Tillmans’ approach in his exhibitions, where he deliberately rejects traditional spatial hierarchies, also joins Lefebvre’s critique of the abstract space of capitalism. When Tillmans hangs his photographs from floor to ceiling, ignoring museum conventions, he realizes what Lefebvre called “the right to the city”, the right to transform and appropriate urban space, or in this case, exhibition space. He literally democratizes the way we interact with art.
Lefebvre’s spatial philosophy finds a particular echo in the way Tillmans treats intimate spaces. Photographs of messy bedrooms, bathrooms, crumpled clothes on a chair are not mere domestic still lifes, but explorations of what Lefebvre called “differential space”, those spaces that escape the homogenizing logic of capitalism. In these images, Tillmans captures what Lefebvre considered essential: the appropriation of space by the body and the everyday.
During his major retrospective at the MoMA in 2022, titled “To Look Without Fear”, Tillmans pushed this spatial logic to its climax. The exhibition itself became a production of space in the Lefebvrian sense, where visitors were invited to navigate not according to an imposed linear path, but according to their own desire. The photographs were not grouped by themes or chronologically, but created constellations of meaning that emerged organically from their juxtaposition.
This retrospective also reminded us that Tillmans’ work is deeply rooted in history. His photographs from the 90s, with their celebration of club culture and post-AIDS sexual liberation, cannot be understood without the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall and that brief period of global optimism that followed. As Lefebvre would have analyzed, these images capture a historical moment when new social spaces were actively being produced by marginalized communities.
But make no mistake: Tillmans is not a neutral documentarian. His gaze is deeply political, engaged, and sometimes even didactic. When he photographs demonstrations against the Iraq war or for LGBT rights, or when he creates posters against Brexit himself, he fully assumes the role of the artist as a political actor. As Lefebvre emphasized, “changing life, changing society, means nothing if there is no production of an appropriate space.”
What is particularly striking in Tillmans’ work is his ability to make visible what Lefebvre called “the everyday”, this dimension of social life that often escapes theoretical analyses but constitutes the very matter of our existence. Images of a t-shirt drying on a radiator, an apple placed on a table, a man washing his hair in the shower, all these banal scenes become, under Tillmans’ lens, revelations about the very texture of our social life.
Tillmans has this rare faculty to show us simultaneously the macro and the micro. In his astronomical photographs, where he captures stars, planets and celestial phenomena, he confronts us with cosmic immensity. But in his close-ups of skin, fabrics or crumpled paper, he reveals an equally vast universe in the infinitely small. This constant oscillation between different spatial scales would certainly have fascinated Lefebvre, who was interested in the articulations between the body, the habitat, the city and the world.
There is something profoundly democratic in this vision that grants equal importance to a view of the starry sky and a corner of a crumpled sheet. As Lefebvre wrote, “the everyday, the near, is as far as the elsewhere and the elsewhere is as close as the everyday.” This dialectic of the near and the far is at the heart of Tillmans’ aesthetics.
But beware, I would not want you to think that Tillmans is an “easy” or accessible photographer. His abstractions, like the “Silver” or “Freischwimmer” series, with their vibrant colors and organic shapes, may seem hermetic at first glance. However, these works are not empty formalist exercises. They explore the very limits of the photographic medium and question our conception of what an image is.
It is precisely this tension between accessibility and complexity that makes Tillmans such an important artist. He refuses elitist jargon and intellectual poses, but never sacrifices conceptual depth. His installations, with their apparent casualness, are in reality meticulously orchestrated to create complex visual dialogues. As Lefebvre said, “the simple is not the simplistic, and complexity is not complication.”
Tillmans’ career, from his beginnings in magazines like i-D to his institutional consecration with the Turner Prize in 2000 and his major retrospectives in the most prestigious museums, perfectly illustrates what Lefebvre called “the conquest of everydayness”. By elevating the banal to the status of art, by making visible marginalized bodies and desires, by refusing established visual hierarchies, Tillmans has truly transformed our way of seeing.
And is that not the greatest success of an artist? To make us see what we had before our eyes but did not notice. To make us feel what we had normalized to the point of anesthesia. To make us think about what we had relegated to the blind spots of our consciousness. As Lefebvre so rightly said, “changing life is first and foremost changing space.”
So, the next time you see a photograph by Tillmans, whether it’s hung with a simple drawing pin in a trendy gallery or printed in a magazine, remember that you are not just looking at an image. You are participating in a radical reconfiguration of our way of seeing the world.
And that, bunch of snobs, is much more subversive than all your convoluted theories about contemporary art.
- Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, Gallimard, 1975.
- Lefebvre, Henri. “The Production of Space”, Éditions Anthropos, 1974.
