Intimate Exposures: Wolfgang Tillmans’ Politically Amorous Photographs at Centre Pompidou

Jamie Zhou

Wolfgang Tillmans. The State We’re In, A, 2015

Prior to the five-year closure of the Centre Pompidou in September, Wolfgang Tillmans transformed its vacated public library into a space that exposes the fragility and endurance of human connection amidst a fractured political climate. In the exhibition video, Tillmans introduces one of the defining pieces of the exhibition, The State We’re In, A (2015). A photograph of a boundless seascape of disquieting turbulence that echoes the current global political turmoil. Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. His work destabilises hierarchies of what counts as valuable or transformative by magnifying moments of joy, melancholy, and unfettered self-expression. In Tillmans’ undiscriminating gaze, he invites us to confront the vulnerability and resilience that reside within us, even when tides are against us.

Emerging from London and Berlin's underground club scene, and contributing to fashion magazine i-D, Tillmans gained recognition for documenting ravers' unfettered freedom and escapes from the everyday. For him, nightclubs were countercultural sanctuaries as spaces of unsurveilled self-expression and freedom, where bodies are temporally free from logic of labour and normative gazes. His early, iconic works, like Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees (1992), reinvent the polish of fashion photography. Tillmans' friends, Alexandra Bircken and Lutz Huelle, clothed only in underpants and coats, perch playfully on tree branches, their bodies exposed yet unguarded. This work, included in the Pompidou exhibition, illustrates his ability to capture intimate portraits that reveal subjects of desire enmeshed with vulnerability and melancholy.

Wolfgang Tillmans. Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees. 1992

Moments of fragility are revealed through the connection between lovers, friends, and between the gazer and the gazed. This relationship extends beyond the subject of the photograph to include the viewer themselves. The materiality of unframed prints, a signature of Tillmans' practice, removes the artifice of conventional presentation. Taped directly onto the gallery walls and library bookshelves, the surface of the photograph becomes like a tactile skin. This method creates a "non-hierarchical space" where each image, from a portrait to a still life, is presented with equal weight and validity, echoing the title of his 2003 retrospective, “if one thing matters, everything matters”. This unconventional approach intensifies the sense of unmediated immediacy, drawing viewers into the moment depicted and collapsing the distance between them and the photograph's subject.

The perishability and fragility of subjects in the exhibition are accentuated through their juxtapositions with still-life shots of nature. A blossoming tulip that leans from the side of the frame, a half-cut avocado oxidising. The vitality and eroticism of the mundane linger in these overlooked objects. The ordinary takes on a sensual quality, with a photograph of a withering flower carrying the same precariousness as a portrait of a reclining lover. In pairing nature and the human form, Tillmans constructs a shared vocabulary of impermanence, where mortality and desire intertwine to create a palpable tension.

Since the early 2000s, Tillmans has increasingly turned his camera towards explicitly political subjects, producing posters with activist slogans. His own body becomes part of this entanglement. In Lüneburg (self) (2020), Tillmans lies on a hospital bed, with medical bands around his wrist, photographing himself with a phone balanced on a plastic water bottle. The image carries the weight of his experience living with HIV, entwined with the memory of his partner lost to AIDS. Here, vulnerability becomes a source of strength and resilience, a concept he explores with his work. This echoes Judith Butler's reminder that "we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies, as a field of desire and physical vulnerability, of a publicity at once assertive and targeted." Butler's work highlights how our shared bodily vulnerability is a political force, a theme Tillmans' work embodies by asserting the worth of lives and bodies often overlooked or targeted. His portraits challenge gender ideologies by calling attention to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Through the juxtaposition of gender-role symbolism, the photographer blurs the distinction between binaries to create a visual signal for queer subjectivity, aligning with Butler’s ideas of gender constructs and embracing those who have been traditionally excluded.

Wolfgang Tillmans. Lüneburg (self), 2020

Tillmans' images reorient the way we see. As I walked through the immense, undivided exhibition space, my gaze folded into his. Everywhere I looked felt as though it could be one of his photographs: friends chatting in front of a print, a visitor leaning close to inspect the pin holding an image in place, even the worn-out carpet of the library taking on an enticing quality. Tillmans' images are phenomenological because they immerse the viewer, making them attuned to the granular particularities of presence that resist the reduction of others to abstractions imposed by political ideologies, and the quiet acts that sustain the everyday.

In Tillmans’ images, bodies and natural forms share a common precariousness. A melancholic lover, a flower on the cusp of decay, a sea in turbulence. He isolates moments so fleeting they might vanish without us ever realising they had existed. In an age defined by political fracture, images of intimacy and connection act as points of orientation, suggesting that the same forces that render us vulnerable also open us to resilience, to tenderness, and to the possibility of solidarity. Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. By placing the body alongside the mutable rhythms of nature, Tillmans gives visual form to a central paradox of our time – fragility and hope, resistance and exposure, coexisting within the same frame.