23 Quotes by Wolfgang Tillmans

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.

I think there is something very consoling in feeling lost in space but also feeling grounded, and seeing that all of this is part of a bigger clockwork

What most artists using photography feel that they need to do is to show that they are serious, that they are not taking snapshots. To point a camera at something does not qualify you as an artist because everybody has done that.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement.

It would be so easy to lose the plot now. It's not about achieving something for its own sake, and taking pictures for their own sake. But to make conscious decisions and choices, and it includes this constant questioning - Why am I taking pictures? Because really, the world is... it has pictures enough. I mean, there are enough pictures out there.

My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.

For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.

I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.