A kitchen portrait, a freight container in Mongolia and a camera-free abstraction all appear in Wolfgang Tillmans’ catalogue. His installations can place ordinary photographs alongside work conventionally given more space or ceremony. The choices of size and placement help determine which image a visitor stops to consider.
That approach extends to the installation. To look without fear, the retrospective shown at SFMOMA from November 2023 to March 2024, included framed prints, loose photographs, magazine pages, video and the ongoing Truth Study Center tables. Tillmans helped arrange the work. Changing a photograph’s size or neighbour becomes another decision about what it can mean.
In The Art Newspaper, Osman Can Yerebakan’s review of the earlier MoMA presentation describes small prints beside large ones, with pictures extending into spaces outside the galleries. His account catches something essential about the arrangement: a museum can make a photograph feel precious before a viewer has properly looked at it. Tape and binder clips interfere with that ceremony.
The Cock (kiss), made in a London club in 2002, and the darkroom-generated Freischwimmer works extend the range further. Tillmans presents figurative and camera-free photographs within the same practice. The exhibition arrangement has to accommodate those different ways of making an image without treating one as an explanatory aside.
Jodie in my kitchen and Intermodal Container In Mongolian Landscape, b are both from 2023. In the gallery’s survey, they receive the same basic invitation to be looked at as the abstractions. The installation decisions matter because they can make that equality visible: a larger print, a nearby photograph or a loose sheet changes where attention goes. An ordinary subject need not be a minor work.