Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wolfgang Tillmans
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: August 16
Photographer
Printmaker
Kreisfreie Stadt Remscheid
People
Idea
Ridiculous
Ideas
Picture
Flimsy
Little
Based
Discard
Done
Begin
Grabbing
Every
Taking
Selves
Really
Hold
Reject
Make
Successful
Fleeting
Would
Known
Seriously

More quotes by Wolfgang Tillmans

Image
I find fashion magazines so incredibly boring . . . There still is no new photography and no new concerns.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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
Image
To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
I love people, and photographing people is something I hope I never get tired of.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
I see my practice as picture making. Whatever is available, I use.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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
Image
Boy George of course, was my idol as a teenager. I haven't photographed him, even though I know him now. He wants the pictures to be retouched, and I don't want that.
Wolfgang Tillmans
Image
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