At MoMA, Wolfgang Tillmans Reflects on His Decades-Long Career without Fear

There is something wonderful about seeing tape on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art. In “To look without fear,” a new retrospective chronicling the work of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, the small, transparent rectangles holding up Tillmans’s work are more than just adhesive.

The tape is practically a metaphor, one that runs throughout the entire exhibition. This is an outsider trying to understand the world and his place in it, one who—despite seemingly inheriting the Earth—acknowledges the transiency and smallness of it all in the grand scheme of life. Why not display your work in a major museum retrospective with tape? It’s all ephemeral: the show, the moments captured, life. It’s as if all that matters, Tillmans seems to say, is that we do indeed look without fear.

The exhibition is at once a catalog and a chronicle of Tillmans’s career, ideas, and experiences since the late 1980s. While he has experimented with a variety of forms throughout his career—from portraiture and photograms to installations and music, all of which are on view—the strongest works in the show are the ones that feel the most personal, that most closely reveal how he looks at, and has been shaped by, the world.

In Tillmans’s earlier work, these qualities can be found in his scenes of nightlife, some of which are reminiscent of the photographs of Nan Goldin, who appears in an exhibited image. There are sparks of flaming youth in his photos as there are in hers. A documentary eye is cast, in a flash, on forehead sweat exerted from dancing, eyes closed in ecstasy under colored lights, ripped jeans patched and repatched innumerable times, and a rough, tight kiss on the dance floor. There’s a sense of artistic and personal exploration that has taught Tillmans, from behind the camera, to look at his work and life with confidence and courage.

In images like these, we taste the simultaneous insider- and outsider-ness that pervades Tillmans’s career. He is doubtlessly in the club, but is an onlooker, an observer. It’s his own understanding of this juxtaposition that has cemented the placement of his work in a certain cultural consciousness. As an outsider, he knows how to photograph those on the fringe like himself and understands his placement in the universe not just as a photographer, but as a queer person living in and through times of international cultural upheaval, particularly the AIDS crisis. Images like these and those taken among other international subcultures led to his work first being published in i-D magazine, spreads of which are on view.

The strongest work in the show also includes portraits of people who appear so frequently, they can only be described as muses—like the androgynous pair Alex and Lutz; or Tillmans’s former partner, the painter Jochen Klein, who passed away from AIDS-related causes in 1997. Indeed, it was the photographs of Alex and Lutz that pushed Tillmans’s career forward in the 1990s after the images were seen at an art fair. Tillmans approached these subjects with love and reverence, documenting them only exactly as they are. Such a viewpoint also extends to the proliferation of still lifes throughout the exhibition, which are another highlight. Like the artist’s muses, these, too, are revelatory because they show what moves him.

Tillmans’s ease of capturing a subject as it is extends to portraiture of all kinds, whether it’s of people he knows, or celebrities like Chloë Sevigny, Moby, Liv Tyler, or even Lady Gaga. What’s interesting about the celebrity images, too, is that they rarely take up large wall space; they’re often tiny in comparison to the photos of Tillmans’s aforementioned muses. The notable exceptions are the photos of the decorated DJ Smokin’ Jo and Frank Ocean.

The latter’s photograph, which covered Ocean’s iconic 2016 album Blonde, is a centerpiece of the exhibition. It’s another way Tillmans trounces expectations of a typical museum show—these are not all blown-up celebrity Avedon portraits. In other words, “To look without fear” is the collective view of a life that also includes some famous people, but the life and the work are much more, much bigger than that. It’s refreshing that Tillmans doesn’t rely on celebrity in this show, but rather leans into the ideas and the people that inspired his earliest photographs in the first place.

Yet while the show fills 11 rooms, parts of it read less like a survey of Tillmans’s essential work and more like a bid to fill space. This is especially true of the gallery of disappointing digital images that includes a series made at produce trade show Fruit Logistica. The space swaps the poignancy and empathy of Tillmans’s other work for images that feel more sterile and unproductively meandering. There’s an argument to be made that this is the purpose of the digital work, the likes of which are stereotyped for their hyper-cleanliness of imagery, but the lack of soul here feels more banal than contemplative.