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The picture of the guy pissing on the chair was a picture I had to do. I had the idea of this absurd act of pissing on a chair rather than in a toilet or on the ground, and this minimal act being so transgressive, even though no major harm is done.

Wolfgang Tillmans

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Wolfgang Tillmans
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: August 16
Photographer
Printmaker
Kreisfreie Stadt Remscheid
Though
Toilet
Rather
Chair
Absurd
Idea
Harm
Done
Major
Even
Ground
Transgressive
Picture
Pissing
Guy
Minimal

More quotes by Wolfgang Tillmans

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To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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I find fashion magazines so incredibly boring . . . There still is no new photography and no new concerns.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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For me, a good portrait shows the fragility and humility of the person, and at the same time a strength, a resting in themselves.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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This coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe coming closer together, and nightlife and techno and ecstasy culture seemed like a very powerful panEuropean movement.
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I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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Books have this function that help me to understand the work I've done, to wrap it up. Once it's done, fortunately, it doesn't mean there's closure. Change in my work happens not in revolutions - it's more evolutionary.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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A photocopier is a camera in its own right. I was fortunate to grow up in the time and culture that I did. I was allowed to develop an awareness that the art that really moves me is actually based on an original image.
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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. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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Now there is such a closed loop between realness and commercialism that one has to question why do more and more and more of those pictures. It's almost like everybody deserves a book about themselves, and everybody deserves a whole issue of Vice magazine devoted to them.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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The true authenticity of photographs for me is that they usually manipulate and lie about what is in front of the camera, but never lie about the intentions behind the camera.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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I always think that we know so much more than one would have ever known before. But I don't know if that's really true.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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Big ideas don't make them selves known as big. They begin with the little, ridiculous ideas that most people would discard or reject. Every successful picture I've done has really been based on taking a very flimsy, fleeting little idea, grabbing hold of it, and taking it seriously.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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My work is aimed at creating a world in which I wish to live. Consequently, it is about creating ideals with the aid of realistic techniques. My most fundamental motivation is a desire for unity, fusion and sense of community.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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This ongoing coexistence which makes life sensational. The eyes have this ability to flip around what they see from one second to another, to see something as an object, and then as a design. That's really liberating, and I try to convey that in my work, that your eyes are free and you are free to use them.
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On the one hand I follow a vocation because I have an ability that I should exercise, but I want to use it for a reason, because I don't see that the freedoms that I enjoy are God-given realities. So I have a very healthy, activist general tension in me which feels that no, this is not gratuitous, it is important to keep this in focus.
Wolfgang Tillmans
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What I'm interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
Wolfgang Tillmans