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Trajectory

Hazleton, Pennsylvania (USA), 1947
Tillmans lived in Hamburg until the late eighties when he moved to England. During this early period, he experimented reproducing images, some taken from newspapers and some his own photographs, with black-and-white laser photocopiers. This medium allowed him to erase the surfaces, alter the focus and play with the scale of the copies, which were presented in triptych format.

From 1990 to 1992, he studied photography at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, although he had already begun to work for some British fashion magazines such as The Face or I+D. Tillmans introduced a new pseudo-documentary style into fashion photography, reminiscent of photographs by the likes of Nan Goldin, which, far from being spontaneous and immediate as they may seem, are carefully structured and designed. His work, in which he portrayed images of youths at parties, clubs and concerts, quickly received widespread recognition and he produced portraits of some of the famous personalities of the time, such as the model Kate Moss, the pop star Damon Albarn or the musician and composer Moby.

Despite having exhibited in Hamburg, in 1993 he held what he considered to be his first exhibition. It was at the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne. There, he presented some of the photographs he had published previously in magazines alongside originals, all unframed, unaligned, and stuck directly on the walls, a characteristic of all his later shows. With this presentation, he proposed to show his work while distancing himself from the hierarchy that distinguishes an image developed in a darkroom from one reproduced in the media or by a printer; to him, they are all equally valuable. This form of installation was also meant to put to test the rigidity and the permanence of photography and reconcile it with the flexibility and changeability of the reality it represents.

Tillmans has recognized that, despite his feelings of panic about AIDS, which have greatly affected him, his images are optimistic because he has accepted the fragility of life and has decided to celebrate it. Although his photos focus on his everyday life and some of its protagonists are friends of his, he has never wanted them to be identified with the idea of a diary or an autobiography; this is why he shies away from the use of dramatic effects and seeks what has been defined by the term "indeterminate"; his characters always remain expressionless.

During the mid-nineties, as he analysed how his work was being received, he began to investigate the possibilities of abstraction and temporarily abandoned the representation of people. His Intervention Pieces, in which he exposed the photographic paper to different light sources in the darkroom, belong to this period. Through this process, he wished to make manifest the duality of photography as a means of representation and as a physical object. S. R.