Transforming Images, Crossing Boundaries—Wolfgang Tillmans and Contemporary Photography
Anyone with an interest in contemporary photography will at some point have come across the name Wolfgang Tillmans.
“Contemporary photography begins with Tillmans and ends with Tillmans.”
It is hardly an exaggeration to say so. Since the 1990s, Tillmans has continuously renewed the visual culture of each era. There are other photographers who symbolise their times, but none have so consistently responded to them as he has.
Despite IACK’s commitment to dealing with contemporary photography, we had long lacked any of Tillmans’s books in stock. I had felt a sense of incongruity about this. In this article, with three newly arrived books of his, I would like to explore what makes Tillmans such a singular figure in contemporary photography.
Wolfgang Tillmans as an Artist
What comes to mind when you hear the name Wolfgang Tillmans?
Photographs of youth culture and sexual minorities; installations where images are arranged like celestial bodies; prints directly affixed to walls; abstract works produced in the darkroom; early explorations of digital photography’s potential; projects confronting social issues; and, in addition, his work with video and music. Listing these alone demonstrates how prolific and multifaceted an artist he is.
Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and London, England. German-born, international in outlook and exhibited around the world, Tillmans spent many years in the UK and is currently based in Berlin. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.
(Artist profile from WACO WORKS OF ART website)
Books are inseparable from Tillmans’s practice. From his earliest years until today, print media has been at the core of his work. The three titles newly arrived at IACK—spanning from the 1990s to the present—vividly embody this.
Beyond the Boundaries Between Catalogue and Artist’s Book
“Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us” (Spector Books, 2025)
Published in conjunction with his current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (September 2025), this volume is an exhibition catalogue and a summation of Tillmans’s career.
The Centre Pompidou, opened in 1977, is one of the world’s foremost museums of modern and contemporary art. On the eve of a major five-year renovation, Tillmans was granted carte blanche to carry out a project within the building—a testament to the esteem in which he is held. He transformed the entire second floor of the Bibliothèque publique d’information (BPI) into a vast installation, rethinking the library as both architecture and a site of knowledge.
This book documents the project in full. Plates of artworks alternate with installation views, showing how Tillmans made the space his own. Essays by a younger generation of writers further cast new light on his practice.
While the work is, strictly speaking, a catalogue, Tillmans never produces a publication that functions as a typical exhibition record with plates, installation shots, and essays. Each of his books is more naturally described as an artist’s book.
As I have previously noted in a previous article, one of the defining characteristics of contemporary photobooks is the conviction that a photobook should be strongly shaped and authored by the artist. Tillmans refuses to make a catalogue that is merely a collection of works; he insists that even catalogues must hold the qualities of an artwork. (1) The earliest demonstration of this conviction—and one of the iconic photobooks of the 1990s—is "Concorde".
"Concorde" (Walther König, 2025)
First published in 1997 to coincide with the exhibition "I didn’t inhale" at Chisenhale Gallery, London, "Concorde" depicts the now-retired supersonic airliner as seen from everyday perspectives on the ground. It contains no essays or textual apparatus, only a carefully sequenced arrangement of photographs. Far from being just a compilation, it is conceived as a work in itself.
This stance emerged partly in opposition to the many books and catalogues that merely compiled works without artistic intent. But for Tillmans, the divide between catalogue and photobook does not exist. Through rigorous editing and direction, he instilled in his publications the same philosophy as his exhibitions, elevating them from documentation to artwork.
Indeed, Tillmans has produced most of his major photobooks in response to exhibitions. It is almost unheard of for a photographer’s “catalogues” rather than “photobooks” to become their defining works. In his case, this phenomenon is not due to a lack of photobooks; rather, it is because the quality of his catalogues reaches the level of independent artworks.
The Centre Pompidou catalogue exemplifies this: though it includes the functions of a catalogue — installation views, plates, and essays — it attains the completeness of an artist’s book.
Books as Exhibition Spaces
“Wolfgang Tillmans: Things matter, Dinge zählen” (Walther König, 2025)
Another of his recent books takes an even more experimental approach.
This book is composed by layering excerpts from the collection catalogue published in 1987 by the Albertinum Museum in Dresden, Germany, with his own exhibition catalogue, "If one thing matters, everything matters", published in 2003.
At first glance, it may sound difficult to grasp, but the book is in fact an experimental artist’s book that reflects Tillmans’s practice in an even more concentrated form. In a sense, it is easier to understand if one considers it not so much as a “book” but as a flat installation unfolding within the space materially contained by the book itself.
Pages and photographs overlap, entering into dialogues that resemble an installation rendered across the printed surface. The book stages a reconsideration of the past through the lens of the present.
This fluid movement between spatial and printed media is one of Tillmans’s key traits. Responsive to the shifting nature of photography in each era, he navigates between print and digital image, video, the virtual and the real, private life and society, politics and art. This balance is what makes him a truly contemporary artist.
Even in these three volumes alone, one sees how he continually recalibrates the relationships among images, prints, installations, and photobooks, shifting their scale and meaning in response to the times.
The Core of Tillmans’s Contemporaneity
Repeated armed conflicts over territory, border closures during the pandemic, and censorship have shaped the era he has lived through. At the same time, it has witnessed post-Cold War liberalisation, globalisation, and informatisation, as well as the digitalisation of photography and moving images. People have simultaneously gained new possibilities, both physically and conceptually, to cross boundaries in unprecedented ways, as borders have become ever more sharply drawn and visualised.
Photography, too, has been freed from its physical constraints by technological developments, becoming more mobile than ever. Tillmans has consistently responded sensitively to these historical shifts in photography, starting with magazines. From print to data, film to digital, real to virtual, and back again—his contemporaneity lies in the awareness with which he has embraced and answered these changes.
What, then, do we mean when we say “contemporary photography”?
The phrase is highly abstract, yet we use it as if it denotes a particular kind of photography.
Should someone ask me to present an artist whose work perfectly embodies the term, I would confidently name Wolfgang Tillmans.
Article by Yukihito Kono (18 September, 2025)
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*(1) Although the location and the detailed historical background are different, a similar story was also told in an interview with Multipress in Norway.
Artist Interview: Line Bøhmer Løkken (Photographer/Multipress)｜https://www.iack.online/pages/artist-interview-line-bohmer-lokken
Title: Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us
Artist: Wolfgang Tillmans
Editor: Florian Ebner and Olga Frydryszak-Rétat
Designer: deValence, Lyosha Kritsouk
Publisher: Spector Books, 2025
Format: Softcover with flaps, thread-sewn
Pages: 272, over 600 color illustrations
Size: 220 × 280 mm
Language: English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 9783959059213
Price: ¥9,350
▶︎Click here for online shopping
https://www.iack.online/products/wolfgang-tillmans-nothing-could-have-prepared-us-everything-could-have-prepared-us
Title: Concorde
Artist: Wolfgang Tillmans
Publisher: Walther König, 2025
Format: Softcover
Size: 190 × 240 mm
Pages: 128, with 62 full-page color illustrations
Language: German && English (with text by the artist)
Edition: 6th edition
ISBN: 9783960981671
Price: ¥6,050
▶︎Click here for online shopping
https://www.iack.online/products/concorde-by-wolfgang-tillmans
Title: Things matter, Dinge zählen
Artist: Wolfgang Tillmans
Editors: Dennis Brzek & Hilke Wagner
Publisher: Walther König, September 2025
Format: Softcover, perfect binding
Size: 210 × 297 mm
Pages: 312, with 600 color illustrations
Language: German &English
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 9783753308197
Price: ¥8,250
▶︎Click here for online shopping
https://www.iack.online/products/wolfgang-tillmans-things-matter-dinge-zahlen