STILLED LIFE
Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s current show at Zwirner scatters digital prints, in various sizes and formats, throughout the rooms of the gallery. There are posters hung on the walls with clips, 3x5 prints set flat on plywood tables, and artwork-sized images in frames. Though eccentric, the installation is elegant and sincere. At a time when anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account uses photographs to craft a personal identity, Tillmans’ speak richly, and simply, about his life.
These photographs don’t fall into a narrative with predictable crescendos, but, taken together, give a complex, vivid account. There are tender snapshots of lovers and friends. There are archly-composed still-lifes of teeming ashtrays and plates of rotting vegetables. There are views of messy studio spaces and the laundry room in an apartment. There are proofs with random printing errors and misaligned text. There are street photos of a political protest in Osaka. And there are foggy cellphone shots of nightclub goings-on.
Some of these are images of jaw-dropping beauty. One glossy color poster shows weeds rising from the cracks between mossy paving stones. Another shows a field of clouds at daybreak through an airplane window. These views are elegaic. They speak to photography’s ability to still time to one second and also to capture one’s life – one’s fragile, flickering emotional state – at that second. The show’s presentation, that enlarges certain moments and shrinks others, is true to the way memory works – the way significant events (weddings, deaths, fights) can be nearly forgotten, while mundane events (a walk home from a party, a conversation with a stranger on the train, a fragmented dream) can be recalled, forever, indelibly. It’s these moments that matter, and photography contains them.