Burg [Hardcover]

Wolfgang Tillmans (Author), David Deitcher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1998 | Series: Photobook

Accept no substitutes. Wolfgang Tillmans could well be the coolest photographer on the planet, and here's the evidence. Always imitated, never bettered, he's the lens-meister of the zeitgeist, the photo-journo who went artside, a man in constant demand, moving effortlessly from magazine to fashion shoot to gallery retrospective. He creates identities, he's the brand name of hip. From Ray Gun to i-D, his images feel iconic before they're out of the fluid. I'll be your mirror, he whispers, and the Gen X-kids find themselves reflected in his always open pictures. Make your own meaning, rave about them, the artifice, the stagings, it's so close to home and snapshot-casual you could do it yourself. But you couldn't. Framing is all. Every shot is classically composed, it's just the subjects that are so Now. From the portraits that made him famous, through the still lives and landscapes (undermining the genres with every shot), this second book, with design and layout from the man himself, is high colour, dirty realist heaven. Finding the still point in the information overload, the sexuality in the machine, and the image in the image saturation, Tillmans gives us the brief epiphanies we might just remember as our own.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These three inexpensive volumes present the work of some of today's most interesting and accessible art photographers. Emotions & Relations collects the work of five relatively established photographers who first came to know each other while in art school and the 1970s and have since sometimes been grouped as the "Boston School." While most members share similar content (their friends and acquaintances as subjects) and technique (lush, painterly uses of color), each demonstrates a clear individual style. This catalog to an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle makes a fine case for both their grouping and their specific talents, offering two short essays on the show and the "school" and introductions to each artist preceding the separate portfolios. While all five?Nan Goldin, David Armstong, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia?have published monographs, this volume offers new insights for substantial art libraries and a concise and beautiful compendium for small and medium public libraries. The German Tillmans and Japanese Mori are younger but still have impressive museum credentials under their belts. Mori's book accompanies a show traveling from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh and Chicago. Her stylized photos, using herself as subject in a variety of over-the-top costumes, at first simply entertain and make the viewer happy. But her juxtapositions of contemporary urban life and surreal fantasy also impart more disturbing thoughts. Tillmans's book, his fourth, is the most comprehensive collection of his work and finally captures the full variety of styles?from diaristic snapshots to painterly still lifes to off-the-wall fashion spreads. What unifies all this is an ability to see the ordinary and be astonished. Emotions & Relations belongs in nearly all libraries; Tillmans is a fine choice for medium and large public institutions; Mori will be at home in larger public and academic art collections.?Eric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 180 pages
• Publisher: Taschen; First Edition edition (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3822878812
• ISBN-13: 978-3822878811
• Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 10.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,402,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Capturing and reflecting relationships, encounters, and time, February 21, 2012

By 

C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Burg (Hardcover)

Wolfgang Tillmans exhibits a wealth of photographs that stimulate the viewer to want to see more, to know more, to connect the photographs in some form of narrative. People are the primary subject matter but there is something about the way the subjects interact with the photographer that implies relationship, intimate knowledge, trust, transparency, and shared experience. Does he really know all these people or does Tillmans have the gift of connection, that seems to permeate his photography.

He is very prolific and the abundance of images begin to suggest a narrative, but the narrative seems to be the life experiences of the photographer and not some underlying narrative armature. Looking at the profusion of color photographs in Berg, I feel that I wish I knew Tillmans, and in some ways wish I was Tillmans, for the photographs are a grand adventure in life.

The photographs are not organized chronologically or thematically in this book, which allows for the process of free association to set in, and inevitably the viewer tries to tie is all together, to link the images. But life is ephemeral and is fleeting and this quality of human existence is captured in the compelling warmth and attraction of the photographs. They are beautiful photographs, color drenched, filled with accidents of composition, of seeing the world as it is and yet focused. His multiple still life images are a good example. They appear to be spontaneous still life, discovered, or quickly assembled, and always a combination of the formal and informal, the calculated and the accidental, the traditional and the unexpected. Cigarette butts and colored rubber bands lie beside tomatoes and cherries. They appear to be visual impressions of the world encountered rather than the world manipulated. They appear to be discovered rather than constructed. They are beautiful and fresh and delightful.

Photographing friends must be a tricky business unless the completely move beyond self judgment and become transparent and expressive before the lens. Tillmans captures this moment, the personal clown, the intimate joker, showing off for the photographer and et also for posterity. I felt the photographs were like a photographic journal, a chronicle of Tillmans life and relationships, and yet he is a perfectionist, a colorist, and a formalist as his broad range of subjects emerges.

Two clues emerged for me as I looked at the wealth of photographs. First, he photographs celebrities with the same style and nuance as he photographs his personal friends. They become ordinary and special at the same time. They lose the glamour of celebrity and become wry players in the vast narrative that Tillmans weaves. Second, it gradually becomes obvious that Tillmans is a gay man and his photographs reflect the world as filtered through the eyes of a gay man.

The young subjects are resistant to definition, to stereotype, and they display this creative resistance in photograph after photograph. He captures the spirit of youthful rebellion in a lived, realistic, effortless, communal manner. We exist in relationship and this ever changing ever growing construction of the self is captured in the cascade of images. We also exist in time, another aspect of the photograph captured in these works. We exist in relationship in time and this fleeting miracle is hard to capture with integrity, but in this respect Tillmans succeeds.