Wolfgang Tillmans

The State We’re In, A, 2015 is an unframed inkjet print on paper. The photograph was taken from the end of a pier in Porto, Portugal using a high-resolution, full-format 35-mm digital camera, capturing a stark stretch of the Atlantic Ocean, where international time lines and borders intersect. The surface of the sea is agitated and ominous, the digital camera revealing in intense detail the topology of the water’s surface. This detail, in combination with the dark and moody colours of the Atlantic on a grey day and the imposing scale of the work, give it a brooding feeling of foreboding. Tate’s copy of the work is the only one in the edition, although an artist’s proof also exists.

The State We’re In, A forms part of Tillmans’ broader project Neue Welt (New World), for which he set out to record what was around him and to create a more empathetic understanding of the world, rather than an overarching statement about the changing character of modern life. As part of the Neue Welt project, he travelled extensively to find places new to him, as well as visiting familiar places with fresh eyes. Using a high resolution digital camera, rather than his previously favoured film format, Tillmans captured images in an extreme depth of detail that is aesthetically compelling, but also suggests the excess of information that is often described as a condition of contemporary life. Discussing The State We’re in, A in particular, Tillmans has said:

The State’s We’re In, A is part of Neue Welt, the loose family of pictures I began at the end of the last decade. These had two points of departure: ‘What does the outside world look like to me 20 years after I began photographing?’ and ‘What does it look like in particular with a new photographic medium?’ In 2009 I started using a high-resolution, full-format 35mm digital camera and had to deal with this incredible change in focus and detail. This is not a purely technical issue but actually raises some philosophical questions, because, as we know, a lot of advances in art have had their origin in advances in technology. I suddenly found myself faced with photographs that show more detail than my brain can ever remember, and more detail than my eye could have seen.

In the case of The State We’re in, A, there is such an infinite amount of detail on the water’s surface – a sea that is very agitated but not yet breaking into waves. We’re seeing the full might of the big wave movements, but then there are also lots of smaller and smaller waves, and they’re all battling with each other, and you can sense that the surface is about to erupt at any spot, at any place and any time. Initially, the photograph was a response to seeing this with my own eyes at the end of a very long pier in Porto, Portugal, in the Atlantic. But then later, back at the studio, I felt that this is actually a little bit like an analogy with the state that we’re in right now.
(Tillmans and McDonough 2016, p.148.)

In his essay in the catalogue for Tillmans’ exhibition 2017 at Tate Modern, London in 2017, in which this work was shown, curator Mark Godfrey discussed its broader socio-political symbolism, remarking that ‘in clouds and waves, Tillmans sees water in a system of constant redistribution … More than that, clouds and waves are bodies of matter that move across the world without the control of nation-states, that cross borders without human control.’ (Mark Godfrey, ‘Worldview’, in Tate Modern 2017, p.74.) Though Tillmans is usually eager to avoid symbol and allegory, the title of this work is a direct reference to contemporary global political tensions.

Further reading
Wolfgang Tillmans, Neue Welt, Cologne 2012.
Wolfgang Tillmans and Tom McDonough, ‘Conversation: Wolfgang Tillmans Considers Three of His Own Photographs’, Canadian Art, Fall 2016, p.148, and online at canadianart.ca/features/wolfgang-tillmans/, accessed June 2017.
Wolfgang Tillmans, On the Verge of Visibility, exhibition catalogue, Fundação de Serralves, Porto 2016.
Mark Godfrey, ‘Worldview’, in 2017, exhibition catalogue, Tate Modern, London 2017.

Aïcha Mehrez
June 2017