Over the course of his 36-year career, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has created what I think of as a new sublime. His work conveys that the bigness of it all is no longer in God, the ceilings of the Renaissance, the grandeur of nature, or the allover fields of the Abstract Expressionists. Tillmans intuited that the sublime had shifted, had alighted on us. It’s in an overhead shot of friends wearing camo and military garb sprawled on the beach in a frondlike configuration and cradling one another — becoming a single organism with tentacles. It’s in a man holding a naked woman’s legs apart and looking below her exposed bush to the grassy dunes beyond. The people we see are often Tillmans’s friends: artists, musicians, designers, dancers. But these aren’t the usual club-kid, gay-bar, grunge-life photos. The rhapsodic rapport Tillmans has with his subjects gives his work a tenderness that seems almost sacred.
The 54-year-old German is much more than a photographer; he’s a visionary polymath who has melted the borders between high and low, insider and outsider, commercial and esoteric. In 2000, at age 32, he became the first photographer to win the Turner Prize, and he has been the subject of two Tate exhibitions. He shot the album cover for Frank Ocean’s Blonde, contributes to i-D magazine, and makes music. (His album from last year is great!) He has been a performer, a filmmaker, an activist, and a DJ. It is no coincidence that the best photographer of his generation came out of such a varied background. Having fought for its high-art status for more than 150 years, photography, by the late 1980s, was overinformed by postmodernists who made work that mainly only the art world liked. Tillmans’s photos — influenced as much by raves and post-punk as the fall of the Berlin Wall — broke through that malaise.
When I saw Tillmans’s 1994 U.S. debut in a group show at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, I did not recognize what he was doing as photography or even as art. He had several unframed photographs, mostly of young people; they were hanging out, sharing secrets, smoking, and dancing. There were things previously published in i-D, a portrait of the dancehall singer Patra in a glowing red gown and dangly earrings, and a guy with his dick out sprawled on the floor as another guy places his foot on his head. The overhead image of the friends in camo was what turned me around: the uniforms, the camaraderie, the proximity, the flesh. Tillmans has discussed using processes that “amplify voices that I feel need strengthening,” and “To look without fear” is full of amplifications of various tribes and subcultures. They suggest that the primal buzz we get from life comes from being with one another — that this is what makes us sublime.