Purple Magazine
— S/S 2015 issue 23
FESPA Digital/Fruit Logistica, 2012
by WOLFGANG TILLMANS
Courtesy of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
The German artist Wolfgang Tillmans surprised everyone back in the early ’90s with photographs that were so familiar but so different from art photography. He moved from magazine work to showing in art galleries and became the only non-Brit to win the Turner Prize.
Using black-and-white, color, every kind of paper and size, Wolfgang recreated the life he led, the places he traveled to, and the things he saw as a photographic setup — each image was composed, even when it didn’t seem to be. He showed the social and sexual adventure that was evolving from the cheap air flights of the early ’90s and the free Internet — the love, lust, loss, discovery, hope, and confusion of the indie-rock generation. An example is the picture that graced the cover of Purple Prose in the winter of 1994 of his friend Lutz Huelle inspecting for the first time the private parts of a girl, who’s also their best friend. Wolfgang is free with his vision of life and shows it.
This visual essay for Purple combines shots taken at a printing and visual communications fair in Barcelona and the Fruit Logistica fair in Berlin. While riding in a taxi, he heard about the fruit fair, where fruits from around the world are displayed. In his photos, the two events commingle, expressing what might be an optimistic disbelief in today’s image world, in which the same media and technology are used in art and commerce. Wolfgang shows the Technicolor fruits of globalization, the packing and processing of the natural world, the world we create and inhabit, which he reprocesses here in photo-collages.
— Text by JEFF RIAN
