September 10, 2018 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Emily Witt’s “What Is New?,” a profile of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. The newyorker.com version’s tagline says, “For three decades, the photographer has explored the fragility of the political consensus on which his personal utopia depends.” Maybe that’s true, although, to me, his explorations are as much hedonistic as they are political. The print version’s succinct “The life and art of Wolfgang Tillmans” is preferable. But I do like that “personal utopia.” It conveys Tillmans's cocoon-like cosmopolitan world – the Panorama Bar, his Berlin studio, galleries such as Nairobi’s GoDown Arts Centre – all superbly described by Witt. Here’s her depiction of his studio:

The space occupies an entire floor of a building originally intended as a department store, designed by the Bauhaus architect Max Taut. It has unfinished concrete floors and long rows of windows. Tillmans cultivates a small wilderness of houseplants—sculptural cacti, papyrus, greenish-purple-leafed begonias, delicate ferns—which he grows from cuttings that he gets from friends and collects on his travels. Walls are decorated with maps, exhibition posters, and protest signs, shelves are lined with records and books. Tillmans takes still-lifes, and I was reminded of one composed from half-smoked packs of Gauloises, decks of Post-it notes, and tape dispensers scattered between computer monitors and plants. He encourages a careful selection of visual clutter, which, he said, “keeps it interesting for the assistants and myself.”

Witt also gets at Tillmans’s creative process. My favourite passage is her description of his “casual, and barely noticeable, often in motion” way of taking pictures:

In Berlin, he took photographs of a building under renovation across the street from his studio, and of his friends dancing at Clausen’s fortieth birthday party. In Kenya, I saw Tillmans reach around a driver’s head to take a photograph through the driver’s-side window of people assembling wheelbarrows. After a radio interview at Kenya Broadcasting Corporation, he took a portrait of the host, Khainga O’Okwemba. As we were walking out of the building, he photographed a pink wastebasket in the corner of someone’s office, a spider plant placed underneath the stairs, and a sign declaring the corporation “a corruption-free zone.” In New York, three months later, walking north from the Whitney Museum to the David Zwirner gallery, in Chelsea, where Tillmans has a show this fall, he led me along the West Side Highway. As we walked past construction sites, open-bed trucks loaded with building material, and construction workers sawing amid showers of sparks, he took photographs. I saw the things that I have mentioned, but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph, if it became one at all. “People are so unable to talk about what makes a picture, because technically they’re all the same, they’re all pigment on paper, and we are using the same cameras,” Tillmans told me. “The reason why a photograph I take can be recognized is literally beyond words.”

That “but what he might have been seeing in that moment would not be revealed until it became a photograph” is excellent, a variation on Garry Winogrand’s inspired “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”