Book for Architects

Ostensibly working in the medium of photography, Wolfgang Tillmans has reimagined the genre. His multifaceted practice includes bold experiments with pictures torn from newspapers and enlarged on a photocopier; achromatic abstractions made through gestural and chemical experiments with the photographic process; poetically mundane still lifes; moving images; and intimate portraits, dense with emotional intensity, that established his reputation as a documentarian of, and participant in, contemporary youth culture.

Tillmans presents these images in floor-to-ceiling installations that refuse conventional methods of photographic display. They combine magazine pages, photocopies, unframed photographs tacked to the walls, framed pictures, and sequences of images in display cases, in sizes ranging from monumental to miniscule. Each element is given equal weight; Tillmans has said, "If one thing matters, everything matters." [1] The relationships between his pictures as they are installed draws on several sources, from the multi-picture layouts of early-twentieth-century German illustrated magazines to a cut-and-paste zine aesthetic and to the layered images of Robert Rauschenberg’s silkscreens. For Tillmans, each photograph is carefully plotted within a matrix that accounts for size and texture, color and form, motif and reference. His investigation of what constitutes an image, how it functions, and how it propagates, is no more relevant than in today’s accelerated, digitized world.

The variability and seriality of Tillmans’s photographs, as well as their elevation of the everyday, also extends to video as with Book for Architects, a personal photo diary of the contemporary built environment. Using standard camera lenses to approximate the human eye, Tillmans captured more than 450 diverse architectural sites in images that resemble snapshots. He combines these in a two-channel video shown on perpendicular walls that frame the viewer in a projected structure, mimicking the work’s architectural content. The images appear without any commentary, soundtrack, or inherent narrative. Unlike other photographers who utilize a standard format to chronicle seemingly neutral typologies, like Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series of industrial structures, Tillmans’s images vary in perspective, size, color, and formal approach, allowing the viewer to glean their own sense of pattern and meaning from the proliferation of images. Such a catalogue might invite the viewer to consider, for example, the economic, political, and environmental impact of buildings.


[1] Wolfgang Tillmans, If one thing matters, everything matters (London: Tate Britain, 2003).