Wolfgang Tillmans. Lighter

Joachim Jager

First recognized in the early 1990s for photographs of friends and others in his immediate milieu, he has developed a highly distinctive style of image making that freely embraces a broad range of subjects—from profound experiences of the everyday to abstractions that result from experiments with the photographic process.
His ability to calculatedly create intimate and immediate images combined with his innovative exhibition strategies has changed the way in which photographic images are made, read and received. An aspect of his artistic practice is to assume a curatorial role—he creates configurations with his photographs that draw formal, symbolic and ephemeral connections. His installations encourage active audience engagement and ask viewers to consider their own experiences within Tillmans’s visual world.
One of Tillmans's other chief modes of presentation is through the book form, and his numerous collections (see bibliography below) offer both extended studies of specific artistic interests such as in the book Concorde, while other books function in a way similar to his gallery installations and include images from (seemingly) several bodies of work, though Tillmans himself might say they are all a part of the same body.
Tillmans won the Turner Prize in 2000.