It just so happened that, in some cases, those people would be gay. Going back to his Hamburg days, he saw people truly living and being who they were and felt like that feeling should be preserved and shared. Living as a gay man, Tillmans felt that art and photography wasn’t TRULY representing real life (he said it himself, magazines like i-D were the only ones who would publish his photos). In that way, they are images of a kind of freedom that was not being expressed honestly elsewhere.” They are not doing silly poses or wrapped up in fashion. Even though my early photographs are re-enactments, they are showing people at rest and at ease with themselves. “ I wanted to somehow represent what was not being represented elsewhere. I promise I only mention that because that experience has given Tillmans and his work a different perspective on the world around him.
“What does that even mean,” you’re undoubtedly wondering? Well, a simplified version would be this: Wolfgang Tillmans is an openly gay man and has been since his Hamburg years. So, what was he trying to do? After consuming an unhealthy number of interviews, the best way to describe is true intention was to just show real life. There is a big misunderstanding there that still persists to this day.” I was not recording the world around me or my tribe or whatever. It was never my intention to be seen as diaristic or autobiographical. “ Back then, magazines like i-D were the only places where I could publish what I would describe as my re-enactments of potentially real situations. His Lutz and Alex series, combined with his other pieces from this time made Tillmans something like a star in the counterculture, although he himself says this was never his intention, This was when Tillmans’ career really started to gain traction one of his most famous pictures, Lutz and Alex sitting in the trees, was taken around this time, and it didn’t take long for it to reach the iconic status it still has to this day. He enrolled at Bournemouth College of Art and Design in 1990, then moved to London in ’92 (he still bounces back and forth between London and Berlin). Tillmans continued to work with i-D in the 1990s, while he was living in England. He established a name for himself with his photos covering the gay club scene and red-light district in Hamburg (most of which were published primarily by i-D, if you really look hard enough you can find them floating around). In the mid-late 80s, he bought a cheap camera, and embarked on his photography journey. As a youth, he spent a LOT of time visiting various art museums and was inspired by the works of various visual artists like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol (Jobey, 2010). Wolfgang Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. But, they require a bit of deep diving so, just stick with me here. The answer to that question, as well as others you might have, are all readily available to us, thanks to the internet. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that almost everyone reading this right now has never heard of Tillmans, and is wondering why exactly he’s, “iconic,” (for the ~3% of people reading this who already know about Tillmans, I apologize). The architect behind this piece is iconic German photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans. On the surface it’s a simple picture of Frank Ocean in a bathroom, covering his face, while some mid-winter sunlight creeps over him via a bathroom window.īut beneath that, it’s also a perfect representation of the many entangled themes that awaits listeners. The cover of Frank Ocean’s Blond (also stylized as, “ Blonde,”) says a lot about the album, more than most people would realize without listening to it an inordinate amount of times.