All Time Famous Wolfgang Tillmans Quotes

Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations. Tillmans was the first photographer, and first non-British person, to be awarded the Turner Prize.

Wolfgang Tillmans Quotes

1. “The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

2. “My work is aimed at creating a world in which I wish to live. Consequently, it is about creating ideals with the aid of realistic techniques. My most fundamental motivation is a desire for unity, fusion and sense of community.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

3. “For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

4. “I think it’s much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

5. “What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
— Wolfgang Tillmans

6. “Big ideas don’t make them selves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I’ve done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

7. “Always take yourself seriously… it’s not the same as being pompous, or overly self-assured, but it is important to understand that the small little ideas that creep up in your mind, often contain the germ of a much larger project. All great art wasn’t born as great art. It first needed to be recognized by the artist him/herself. Through his or her belief in it, it became true.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

8. “I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

9. “I see my practice as picture making. Whatever is available, I use.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

10. “There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can’t deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

11. “To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.
— Wolfgang Tillmans

12. “I heard this wonderful quote – “Only the brave show what they love.” It’s so-embarrassing to approach somebody and say you want to look at them. But without that risk taking, nothing can happen, so I have to make myself vulnerable. What I think is the unifying aspect in people that I like is that they have a sense of their own vulnerability, and I respond to that.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

13. “This ongoing coexistence which makes life sensational. The eyes have this ability to flip around what they see from one second to another, to see something as an object, and then as a design. That’s really liberating, and I try to convey that in my work, that your eyes are free and you are free to use them.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

14. “What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

15. “I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

16. “I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

17. “I want the pictures to be working in both directions. I accept that they speak about me, and yet at the same time, I want and expect them to function in terms of the viewer and their experience. With these abstract pictures, although the eye recognizes them as photographic rather than painted, the eye also tries to connect them to reality. There’s always this association machine working in the brain, and that is why it is important to me that they are actually photographic and not painted.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

18. “My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

19. “I always think that we know so much more than one would have ever known before. But I don’t know if that’s really true.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

20. “The mobility of the eye is such a fundamental treasure that we have, and that coexists with sensation. On the dance floor, you are totally in reality, while also experiencing this dream imagery of changing colors and wet surfaces of skin. Sometimes it’s the shadow outline in the strobe light, and in another moment it’s the closeup of an armpit that you’re looking into. I’m not photographing all the time, but it’s something that I actually see all the time, and not just on the dance floor.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

21. “The picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

22. “A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

23. “It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It’s not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning – Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is… it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

24. “Growing up in the ’80s, questions of style and music and youth culture all seemed inherently political – like gay rights issues, dressing up, wearing makeup, arms protests. A lot of attitude and opinions were expressed through clothes, and they all were meaningful. So in that way, I was so excited about the connection between our private lives and politics – who I kiss, how I like to dance.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

25. “Sometimes it takes a long time for a picture to incubate. And every time I do that, the rewards are so much bigger than what I would have gotten if I had only done the same as I always do. So each time I make an effort and I get out of a lazy routine, it’s amazing how big the reward can be. It’s listening to those little ideas knocking on the door in your mind.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

26. “The original interest in making pictures that don’t directly depict came around ’97 or ’98, when I felt there was such an acceleration of images in the world, and that was before Flickr and so on. So I felt a need to slow down how one consumes photographs. With the abstract pictures, I was engaged in trying to find new images, but in practice, it was a bit like throwing a wrench in the spokes. The omnipresence of photography is at a level that it has never been in the history of the world. I feel really curious to now reengage and see what the camera can do for me.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

27. “Now there is such a closed loop between realness and commercialism that one has to question why do more and more and more of those pictures. It’s almost like everybody deserves a book about themselves, and everybody deserves a whole issue of Vice magazine devoted to them.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

28. “This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe coming closer together, and nightlife and techno and ecstasy culture seemed like a very powerful panEuropean movement.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

29. “This act of piss, which can be considered sexual by some, a pleasurable experience, is at the same time total disrespect. I had once asked a friend to do this picture and he totally refused. So I carried the idea around with me for years. When I was invited to do a Honcho shoot, I approached Phillip, who was the barman at The London Apprentice, and fortunately he knew who I was. He had a copy of my first book, and that broke the ice. At the end of the shoot with him, I realized I could ask him to do this picture. I had waited four years to do it.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

30. “Whatever pictures are put into the world, the balance needs to be readdressed, it needs to be observed. That’s why I am also really questioning what a lot of photography has done since I began. I am not saying because of me, but I mean, photographing some friends partying and publishing the pictures meant something else in ’92 than it does in 2011. And I find the younger generation is not questioning this at all today.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

31. “Books have this function that help me to understand the work I’ve done, to wrap it up. Once it’s done, fortunately, it doesn’t mean there’s closure. Change in my work happens not in revolutions – it’s more evolutionary.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

32. “Boy George of course, was my idol as a teenager. I haven’t photographed him, even though I know him now. He wants the pictures to be retouched, and I don’t want that.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

33. “I find fashion magazines so incredibly boring . . . There still is no new photography and no new concerns.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

34. “For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans

35. “On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don’t see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus.”
— Wolfgang Tillmans