Wolfgang Tillmans (B. 1968)

I think what’s on the picture is what counts. I always try to resist the viewer’s appetite for explanation. That’s what happens with photography; the viewer wants to know how, when, what, where. I look at pictures as pictures. When you look at paintings you don’t ask these questions, you just accept that this is the vignette, or situation, you’re given. That’s very much how I see my pictures. I want to keep those questions out so that it doesn’t matter if it’s staged or not’ (W. Tillmans, interview with C. McCormick, ‘Talking Pictures’, in Camera Austria, Issue 64, 1998).