From tiny weeds to distant galaxies, the photographer likes to scrutinise the interconnectedness of everything. He talks about coping with lockdown – and living through his second pandemic
Wolfgang Tillmans and I talk on the phone on 23 June, which he calls the “fifth anniversary horribilis”, referring to the Brexit vote. He’s at home in Berlin: a day later, he will travel to the UK to install his new exhibition, Moon in Earthlight, in the seaside town of Hove. To conform to Covid protocols, he’ll be doing it on his own, without his usual assistants, carefully placing his photographic images around the space – a former Regency flat owned by his gallerist Maureen Paley. These photographs range from an image of wet concrete pouring out of a nozzle to one of a root’s tendrils creeping along a gap in the pavement. They are presented in a variety of formats, from huge printouts suspended on bulldog clips to small photographs tacked to the wall. Like all his shows, Moon in Earthlight will serve as an installation in its own right, a manifestation of Tillmans’ tender scrutiny of the universe. It also includes a collection of astronomical yearbooks dating back to 1978, when the artist was a stargazing 10-year-old. “Mm!” he says. “It was the first passion in my life. I spent days and nights observing the sky or the sun and its sunspots. What it taught me was the importance of observation and that whatever you’re looking at is always a little bit at the limit of visibility. Like, is this a blur or a star?” One image, an amber blob on a computer screen, depicts exactly that. It’s the view from “a very large telescope in Chile. The fantastic pictures that we see by Nasa are processed, developed pictures that once looked like that screen. I asked the astronomer, ‘So what is this?’ And he said, ‘That’s a galaxy.’”
Tillmans’ work seems driven by an insatiable curiosity. He made his name in the 90s, photographing everything from Concorde to jeans drying on a radiator with a singular, searching perspective, winning the Turner prize in 2000 and going on to exhibit in the world’s heavyweight art institutions (his postponed show in New York’s MoMA, To Look Without Fear, will now take place in September 2022). Some of his portraits have become familiar even to non-gallery-goers: for instance, the shot of a green-haired Frank Ocean in Tillmans’ shower, which became the cover of Ocean’s 2016 album Blonde. Sometimes Tillmans’ subject is just the reaction between light and photographic chemicals. Saturated Light (Silver Works), a collection of abstract images, was made by feeding photographic paper into a printer. Despite this plethora of modes (and he makes music, too, including a club banger, Can’t Escape Into Space, released this Friday in a remix by DJ Honey Dijon) his work usually reveals something of Tillmans himself, from his political beliefs to his sexuality, and, above all, his sense of playfulness. One image in the new show is called Animalistique, and shows him crawling naked by the sea on New York’s gay holiday spot Fire Island. Nice tan, I say. “It’s just the camera exposure,” he replies with a smile. “I try to stay out of the sun normally.”