Wolfgang Tillmans revised monograph published by Phiadon

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans releases an expanded version of the sell out monograph originally published in 2004 through Phiadon. This comprehensive document includes interviews, essays and the artists own writings. Tillmans is one of the most important photographers of his generation in both achievement and subject. He manages to report from within the opaquely tribal worlds of youth and art culture with simultaneous detachment and intimate familiarity. His portraits deliver their subjects to the strangers gaze with disarming candor. His large-scale inkjet prints of aqueous voids threaded with vigorous pigment regularly upstage the works of dedicated abstractionists. He has photographed objects with an eye to startling formal transcendence. As with the epic and seemingly chaotic works of Nobuyoshi Araki the range and scope of Tillmans work can threaten to tip the casual acquaintance into mistaking breadth of activity for undisciplined superficiality. There is no question that the surface is Tillmans playground but as Italo Calvino said "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible." This book leaves no doubt that the reach and authority with which Tillmans hunts the world's surfaces places him at the forefront of photographic practice