Here’s a partial list of things that Wolfgang Tillmans, the world’s greatest photographer under 60, has depicted in art: textiles, flesh, genitalia, misshapen vegetables, snow, TV static, transit systems, the transit of Venus, the ocean, Frank Ocean, clothed people, naked people, people dancing, kissing, hanging out in trees. Tillmans rose to fame in the ’90s as a chronicler of the gay club scene in London and his native Berlin, but he has since wandered, camera in hand, in countless new directions. To look without fear, a MoMA survey exhibition now at the AGO, features more than 350 prints – most of them frameless and stuck to the wall with simple adhesives – yet it cannot possibly capture the range of Tillmans’s interests.
I met the artist in April with the…
