In a corner of Panorama Bar, the upstairs venue of the Berlin night club Berghain, there is a large, unlit photograph of the back of a throat—one of three photos by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans that hang on the walls. Berghain is a techno club known as much for its code of etiquette as for its sound system. Photography is forbidden. Cell-phone-camera lenses are covered with stickers when patrons enter. Doormen are strict about whom they let in, with apparent biases against conspicuous displays of wealth. The party starts at 11:59 on Saturday night and continues until Monday morning; it’s common to stay for twelve hours, or twenty. There is no V.I.P. area. The bathrooms are ungendered, the atmosphere is sexually open, and the ethos is queer. Ravers make pilgrimages to Berghain from all over the world. Some call it “church.” When the club’s owners approached Tillmans to acquire one of his pictures, in 2004, its patrons were mostly gay men, and he chose “Nackt” (“Nude”), a photo of a woman exposing her vulva. In 2009, as Berghain’s reputation grew and its clientele became more heterosexual, he replaced the photo with “Philip, Close Up III,” which shows a man exposing his anus. Six years later, he hung the throat instead, describing it as “kind of like where all the joy comes in, in different ways and forms.” The other two photographs by Tillmans in Berghain, hung on the back wall, are large-format inkjet prints from his “End of Broadcast” series, which depicts television static: a black-and-white scramble that, upon close inspection, reveals pixels of color. He took them in a St. Petersburg hotel room in 2014, just after Russia invaded Crimea. He was thinking about symbols of censorship, how the eye deceives, and how, as he told me earlier this year, “we’re getting all this information and have to learn to let most of it go.” A photograph from the same series is also in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where Tillmans will have a major retrospective in 2021. He had two other surveys last year, at Tate Modern and at the Beyeler Foundation. But, for a certain group of people, having three photographs displayed in the fog and cigarette smoke of Panorama Bar is a more meaningful honor. In the early nineteen-nineties, Tillmans was known for photographs of young people that exuded openness and honesty. He chronicled Gen X and rave culture and took portraits of the musician Aphex Twin and the Blur front man Damon Albarn. He photographed sweating bodies and dilated pupils at Soundshaft, a club in London; the Ragga scene in Jamaica; and the aftermaths of student parties. But Tillmans, who admires the paintings of nineteen-twenties Berlin night clubs by Christian Schad and George Grosz, saw the acid-house-music nights at Opera House, in Hamburg, or the Love Parade, in Berlin, not just as hedonistic gatherings but as a political achievement. “I was always aware that this freedom was only possible because people were not as afraid as they used to be,” he told me. Born in 1968, Tillmans belongs to the first generation of Europeans who, after the wars, were allowed to move easily between countries, reject a single national identity, and have legal gay relationships. He was given a diagnosis of H.I.V. in 1997, when antiretroviral therapy was available to him. He responded to the relative optimism of his era with images that blended into what he called, in an interview, “one reality, where people were happily taking Ecstasy together or partying in a park, as well as being solitary, serious individuals, or sitting naked in trees, as well as sucking cock in some dark toilet corner, with Moby lying in the sun.” (Tillmans photographed the electronica musician in 1993.) Outside the world of his photos, he has admitted, this freedom only existed in “little nuggets and pockets and areas.” Another thread of Tillmans’s art has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends. Tillmans has photographed gay- and lesbian-pride parades, antiwar marches, and Black Lives Matter rallies. In his photographs of the night sky, in which stars are indistinguishable from optical distortions created by the camera, he wanted to draw attention to the unreliability of sight. In an image, from 2014, of seventeen years’ worth of H.I.V.-medication bottles, he acknowledged the miracle of chemistry that was keeping him alive. His art often shows what is new. He has documented subtle changes in design and the environment: the shift from car headlights that look friendly toward ones of sleek, “shark-eyed” aggression; spikes laid down along a sidewalk to deter street sleepers; a sign in an airport that directs people toward a “Rest of World Passports” line; the cladding used in public housing and made infamous after the Grenfell Tower fire in London, last year. “I constantly think of the materiality of this, and of this, and of this paper clip,” he told me at one point, when we were eating takeout curry—he gestured to his plastic food container, the toothed piece of plastic attached to the cap of his water bottle, and a paper clip he was playing with as we spoke. Last November, on the morning after I saw Tillmans’s photographs in Panorama Bar, I visited him at his studio, in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg. The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.” It was a Monday, and Tillmans, dressed in blue Puma sweatpants, Adidas running shoes, and a navy-blue hooded sweatshirt, was standing next to a conference table, drinking a coffee, with several young employees gathered around him. Tillmans has worn the same wardrobe of T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers for twenty-five years. He was, as he often is, the tallest person present, straight-backed and broad-shouldered but still dainty in manner, with unblinking brown eyes that seem to notice everything. Aside from his photography, he also makes electronic music, and he had just returned from Turin, Italy, where, at a festival called Club to Club, he played with the British producer Oscar Powell, performing live versions of their tracks. Tillmans compared the veteran Detroit d.j. Richie Hawtin, who had performed surrounded by equipment and backed by an ornate visual display, with a younger German d.j. named Helena Hauff, who had taken a minimalist approach: two turntables, the glow of cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey. Tillmans took Hawtin’s portrait in 1994. “I love Helena Hauff,” someone said. “I think she’s amazing.” “Ah, yes?” Tillmans, who speaks with a German accent, said. He likes to defer to others in conversation. Tillmans is kind and polite. He compels those around him to be punctual, efficient, and prepared not by severity, but by living at a slightly higher standard than most people. When he asks a question, one becomes aware of the difference between feigning knowledge and being knowledgeable. He can explain why the stripes of a zebra are outlined with colors when viewed with binoculars and why eighteenth-century astronomers misinterpreted the transit of Venus. He avoids automatic settings on the tools he uses and dislikes conversational imprecision. Soon after we met, he described to me how he paints the edge of some photographs so that the colors appear to have saturated the paper. He held up a photograph. “I see,” I said. “I mean, you don’t,” he replied. Tillmans made his first synth-pop album as a teen-ager in western Germany and his second in 2016. His song “Device Control” appeared on Frank Ocean’s album “Endless.” (Tillmans also took the photograph of Ocean on the cover of the album “Blond.”) Tillmans blames the long hiatus from music on a catastrophic cover-band performance at a graduation party almost thirty years ago. “The monitors didn’t work, I couldn’t hear myself, it was just totally embarrassing,” he said. In recent months, he has been thinking a lot about embarrassment, an emotion he sees as both protective and inhibiting, and which he also overcame in another recent decision, to publicly campaign against Brexit. For the first twenty years of his career, Tillmans, who graduated from art school in Bournemouth, England, in 1992, lived and worked primarily in London, a city he has called “the big continuum of my life.” In 2000, he was the first non-British and lens-based artist to win the Turner Prize for British art. Before the referendum on Brexit, he produced twenty thousand posters and a series of T-shirts and social-media posts. Like his photographs, they are deadpan in tone, images of the horizon or white cliffs overlaid with text: “For 60 years the E.U. has been the foundation of peace between European neighbours, after centuries of bloodshed. Vote Remain on 23rd June”; “No man is an island. No country by itself”; “DJ’s and musicians: Before you go to Ibiza and Glastonbury, make sure you’ve used your postal or proxy vote.” Last year, as Alternative für Deutschland, a right-wing political party, threatened to make gains in the German parliamentary elections, Tillmans began another campaign with similar posters, this time in German:“Not loving nationalism”; “Sundays are great: for partying and for voting”;“If you don’t vote, you’re actively supporting the right-wing nationalists. It helps just to vote.” In the two years since the Brexit campaign, Tillmans has emerged as a kind of artistic statesman, interviewed in the German newspaper Die Zeit and speaking at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, on the threats of nationalism. On his Instagram account, he shares clips from articles about European Union trade agreements with China, images of protests, and summaries of his opinions (“Please take a few minutes to read this eye-opening piece,” one such post began). Earlier this year, he joined the architect Rem Koolhaas, a friend of his, in running a workshop that solicited proposals to “re-brand Europe.” Tillmans’s studio is itself a non-bureaucratic creative machine that combines Germanic efficiency and exacting standards with camp posters of baby seals and a stock of Club-Mate soda. Printed outtakes from the anti-Brexit campaign, one with the words “E.U. Bureaucrats” inside a heart, were pinned on a wall under a portrait of Chloë Sevigny holding an electric guitar. A calendar delegated kitchen chores; assistants in baseball caps and vintage sweaters inspected an inkjet print for possible flaws and were ready with updates about flights from Kinshasa, Congo, where Tillmans was going in January to install the first show in a three-year touring exhibition in Africa. Tillmans is a meticulous archivist and stores some of his records in a back room, next to a ficus tree he has kept for nineteen years. No element of his past is considered trivial. During my visit, I saw him struggle with whether to throw out some boxes, frayed and torn, that had been used to hold photos. They bore the names of exhibition venues in marker—Nottingham, Tate—and were stamped with the address of a defunct London studio. Tillmans hesitated. His assistants smiled. “Yes, it’s very important that you have a box file,” one said, teasing him. “A box file, yes,” he said with seriousness. “You want to throw them out?” “Yes!” the assistant said, laughing. “Just stack them under the window over there or something,” he said. “It’s fun for me to just once look at them and say goodbye.”