Wolfgang Tillmans credits as his first significant photograph a hard-to-read shot of a young male body—his own. He was 18, a high school student on a monthlong coming-of-age train trip away from his hometown of Remscheid, Germany. On a beach in southwestern France, holding a range finder camera borrowed from his mother and wearing his favorite shorts and T-shirt, he experimented and wound up with a semi-abstract composition in the manner of a Milton Avery painting: a curving patch of pink cotton, the clothing label in white on black trunks, a tan leg stippled with sand, and a mottled brown beach that takes up half the frame.
“I was looking at the ocean and had a very acute sense of being, that I am in my body on the earth on this beach at this moment,” recalled the 54-year-old artist in New York this past June, three months before the opening of “Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which runs from September 12 to January 1, 2023. “That may be the point of departure for all my work. It is, on the one hand, not very tangible or newsworthy, but conveys a strong sense of being in the here and now.”
Even though Tillmans lived in New York from 1994 to 1995, and has owned a beach house on Fire Island since 2016, this is his first solo museum show in the city. Because his photographs capture and scrutinize the incessant barrage of contemporary life, they can appear, at first glance, to be as guileless as snapshots. They impose a formal unity without losing the impression of randomness. His attraction to fluidity makes Tillmans an exemplary artist for a time in which everything—from world politics to personal identity—is in flux. “He has a very wide-ranging practice that encompasses video, sound and light work, writing, graphic design, and activism,” said Roxana Marcoci, senior curator of photography at MoMA, who oversaw the exhibition. “In photography, he is, to me, one of the most amazing artists, someone who really excels in portraiture, landscape, abstraction, still lifes...I cannot think of another person.”