Benjamin Paul

2002. 61 pp., 36 color photographs, 9 1/2 x 9 in.

ISBN 1-891771-2604 Paper (spiral-bound). $20.00.

The German-born, London-based photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is among the most celebrated of contemporary photographers. Winner of the prestigious Turner Prize and highly influential among younger photographers, Tillmans has also been criticized by many in the world of photography for a body of work that often appears to erase the line between commercial and art photography, snapshot and "print". His interest in youth culture has been described as voyeuristic and exploitative, and yet he has also been widely credited for his ability to define a new aesthetic of intimacy and to celebrate the individuality of a generation that others are happy to write off as "X." Like the work of Nan Goldin, with whom he is often compared, Tillmans's early photography featured his friends and their parties in an effort to capture moments of intimacy within the constraint-free lifestyles of youth cultures. But Tillmans's interest in alternative concepts of beauty, sexuality, and politics is more sociological and distanced.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Still Life is the catalogue of the first museum exhibition of his photography in the United States. The show's organizer, Benjamin Paul, has chosen to emphasize Tillmans's interest in reconsidering such traditional genres as landscape, portrait, and still life within the context of contemporary visual culture. By focusing on the still lifes, Paul emphasizes a subset of the artist's work that is at once lushly beautiful, surprisingly humanistic in its attention to the trappings of lived lives, and particularly well suited to his exploration and exploitation of the aestheticizing so central to both traditional still life and commercial advertising.

This book is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on view 25 October 2002-23 February 2003.

Benjamin Paul was the 2001-2002 Theodore Rousseau Graduate Student Intern at the Harvard University Art Museums.

See exhibition information