Wolfgang Tillmans and the Self-Sufficiency of Images : Ecological Thinking and Contemporary Art

Presenting the first academic criticism of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, this book explores how he has informed a new art discourse of “self-sufficiency,” and positions his work as an ecological practice.

The groundbreaking work of Wolfgang Tillmans since the early 1990s has arguably responded to environmental and social challenges of our times. Interweaving art history with environmental humanities and media theory, this book reveals how Tillmans’s work acts as an alternative and resistant concept for the Anthropocene, comprised of ongoing stories and new realities—as generators of alternative worlds. Ultimately, in this innovative book, Sara R. Yazdani traces the “self-sufficient image” in his work–a term Tillmans coined in a 2007 to refer to artworks as autonomous entities. Yazdani argues, among other things, that photography here serves to explore how individual bodies and collectives, whether human or not, come into existence in the production of affective relations. These relations are arguably, in the work of Tillmans, political as much as epistemological, creating ecologies, histories, and knowledges about bodies, nature, and life itself.

Drawing on extensive archival research, the book presents close analysis of artworks and exhibitions from Tillmans’s archive, publications and artists’ books, notes found in the archive, the history of the artist’s exhibitions from the 1990s to the present, as well as conversations between him and other artists, writers and curators.