16 August 1968, is a German photographer and artist. Born in Remscheid, Germany, he developed an interest in photography during his school years and became involved with British youth culture after spending time in England as a teenager. Between 1990 and 1992 he studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design before settling in London, later dividing his time between London and Berlin. He first came to prominence in the early 1990s through photographs of friends, youth culture, club life, and the emerging rave scene, published in magazines including i-D, Spex, Interview, and SZ Magazin.

Over the following decades, his practice expanded far beyond documentary photography to encompass portraiture, still life, landscape, astronomy, abstract camera-less works, installation, video, music, and publishing. Rather than working within a single genre, Tillmans continuously investigates the material and conceptual possibilities of photography itself, experimenting with scale, display, printing processes, and non-camera images. His installations frequently combine framed and unframed photographs, magazine pages, photocopies, tables, and wall-mounted arrangements, treating the exhibition space as an integral part of the work.

Photobooks have played a central role throughout his career. Important publications include Concorde (1997), total solar eclipse (1999), if one thing matters, everything matters (2003), Truth Study Center (2005), Manual (2007), Neue Welt(2012), What's Wrong with Redistribution? (2015), Today Is the First Day (2017), Fragile (2018), To look without fear(2022), and numerous exhibition catalogues and artist's books. His books reflect the same open sequencing and associative relationships that characterize his installations, bringing together portraits, abstraction, political material, landscapes, still lifes, and everyday observations.

Tillmans was the first photographer and the first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize, awarded in 2000. He later received the Hasselblad Award (2015), the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal (2015), and numerous other international honours. His work has been the subject of major retrospectives at institutions including Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Moderna Museet, and the Centre Pompidou, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary photography.

Reference
Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), German edition. Retrieved July 18, 2026.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Tillmans