Wolfgang Tillmans

FROM THE BOOK

Gil Blank: What’s the basic motivation for your photographic portraiture? Is it at all distinct from the remarkably wide variety of other subjects you seek out?

Wolfgang Tillmans: When I began to define my portraiture, in 1990 to 1991, I wanted to communicate both the feelings I had for my contemporaries as well as the sense I often had of a single person. I wanted to communicate the complexity of that person in its entirety, that lack of a singular reading. I wanted to channel the multilayered character of a personality and its contradictions, the way it’s revealed
in clothes, in styles, in attitudes, and the way a person lives. It’s the fractured reality of identity that fascinates me. I didn’t feel myself well represented in the late-eighties media as I was growing up. Perhaps
I did in some magazines like i-D, but everything else depicted people making odd gestures, or acting crazily, or smiling. They were always apologizing for being the way they were, always giving a single reading of their mood, of what they were about. It took me a while to get my own photography of people in line with the way I saw people. That happened around 1991, when I realized that I needed to strip all the pictorial devices away, so that the subjects wouldn’t have to apologize for who they were, and the picture wouldn’t have to justify its observation. It wouldn’t hint at being more of an artifice than necessary. I got rid of everything that’s artistic in portraiture: interesting lighning, recognizably “special” techniques, and all the different styles that divide us from the subject and are usually considered to be enhancements of the subject of the picture. I found a way of indirect lighting that looks like the absence of artificial light. That’s often been misunderstood. [...] A lot of them are just given to you when you make yourself open and vulnerable to the human exchange that takes place in the photographic situation. That’s how I try to negotiate a portrait. The desire to control the result, to come away with an interesting image, is simultaneous with the admission that I’m not in fact completely in control of it. Ultimately, I have to be as weak as the subject, or as strong. If I go into the situation with a preconceived idea, then I’ll limit the human experience that I might be able to have. The outcome of such a situation is unknowable, and that’s something very hard to bear; people prefer to know that what they do will have a good result. I’ve possibly developed the faith or strength of letting myself fall each time. I risk not knowing what might come out, and I also risk making an important work. That’s what I like about the magazine portraiture that I’ve been doing now for fifteen years. It always sends me back to the zero point of human interaction, the point of not knowing. I know that I’m likely to make a printable picture, but I’m not forced to make an artwork. And I quite like that, that I have no responsibility to the sitter or anything beyond the act itself.