“To Look Without Fear,” which opened on September 12th at the Museum of Modern Art, is the first retrospective of the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans to be held in New York City and his first museum show here since 2006. Born in 1968, in Germany, Tillmans has constructed his art out of a wide-ranging engagement with the world around him and the conditions that have made his life and identity possible. He has photographed friends and lovers; the night clubs in Berlin, where he lives; the Concorde jets that once flew overhead; the materials that give solidity to the structures that surround us; the celestial bodies with which we are in orbit, and the firmament of stars beyond them. Delayed by a year and a half because of the pandemic, a broad survey of Tillmans’s art was already overdue in New York, not only because of his status as one of the most influential photographers of his generation but also for how the city figures frequently in his images. Some of his earliest art works are photocopied enlargements of the skyscrapers on Sixth Avenue from photos taken on a visit that Tillmans made to New York City as a teen-ager, in the mid-eighties. He returned to New York to live from 1994 to 1996, and, in the past decade, has spent several summers in Fire Island, where he owns a house. His gaze on the city is a knowing one, whether it is turned on a downtown It Girl (a portrait from 1995 of Chloë Sevigny holding an electric guitar), an image of rats creeping around, or the Spectrum, a queer night-life venue formerly located in Bushwick. He also makes music, and the new exhibition includes videos accompanied by the soundtrack of his first full-length album, “Moon in Earthlight.”
In 2018, I wrote a Profile of Tillmans that familiarized me with his vast body of images. In the dramatic swerves of the years since then, specific works would come to mind as I read and reported the news. Because of his interest in what is new and different in his surroundings, Tillmans tends to notice cycles of change in their early phases. He photographed demonstrators in Union Square after a police officer killed Eric Garner in New York, in 2014, and had works that reflected on the Russian invasion of Crimea that same year and on the suppression of L.G.B.T.Q. identity in Russia. When nasa published the deep-field image of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, I was reminded of photographs of telescopic data on computer screens that Tillmans had taken at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, in 2012. Tillmans is H.I.V.-positive and, in his art, he explored medical disinformation, equity, and the pharmaceuticals that keep him alive, long before the debates that overshadowed the scientific feat of the mRNA covid-19 vaccines. When I missed going to night clubs in 2020 and 2021, I could look back on his many photographs of clubs and raves, and find an affirmation of partying as a higher-order practice: “I would like to document for the future that it existed,” Tillmans has said, of his night-life photos, “that it cannot be taken for granted, and that there are only a few places in the world where such an intense way of being together so fluidly and freely is possible.”