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Wolfgang Tillmans - Contacts 

From an interview with Helen Sumpter for Time Out London, 23rd May 2011

"Describing my work as conceptual probably makes it more comfortable for those who find responding to it emotionally a bit embarrassing. Because the project came out of paying dues to a place that formed me, it contains a strong element of nostalgia and sentiment. If I were a true conceptualist it would have more of a chronology to it, but it's messy in the sense that I'm painting from photos I've taken at different times over the past 15 years."

"If you look at a lot of the work in this year's “British Art Show 7”, for example, it's equally nostalgic, just in different ways. There's a lot of use of old projectors and analogue recording equipment. There's an element of science fiction there in that you have an audience using powerful hand-held computers tweeting about watching a Super-8 film. When I look at all my photographs and then my paintings and get confused about how time flows between them, I think - well that's a pretty accurate representation of how we experience the world now.

 "If I have one regret about the project it's naming the estate. I always wanted the work to be more allegorical than topographical, about seeing something like a crisp packet on the ground, which becomes a trigger to send you off into a reverie about something else. I had to name it in the end though, because not identifying it just made people more obsessed about where it was."

From an Interview with Sean O'Hagan for The Guardian, 13th February 2011 

"It was – there's no other way to put it – a nice place to grow up," Shaw says, when we settle in his local on Ilfracombe's main street over Guinness and cottage pie before an open fire. "A postwar council estate on the edge of Coventry, with trees, grass and loads of woodland just beyond. The last built-up area before the countryside took over. I don't think it has ever left me, that sense of possibility and familiarity and possible danger lurking out there somewhere beyond. I haunted the place and now it haunts me." 

"His friend, the late art critic and novelist Gordon Burn, caught Shaw perfectly when he pictured him "painting the back room of the social club in Tile Hill with all the seriousness of Monet painting Rouen Cathedral"."

"I am a bit of a prowler," he says, chuckling. "And, I'm a prowler with a camera. I have my territory that I revisit looking for clues to I'm not sure what. I might pass a certain place a hundred times and then, one day, something about it catches my eye. I take a few photographs, usually bad ones, then print them and toss them aside for a while until I find one particular image is nagging away at me. Something is definitely triggered by the photograph and it is that something that I am chasing after when I eventually make the painting."

"Sometimes," he says, almost wistfully, "usually when I have finished a series of paintings, I look at the work and its innate conservatism shocks me. When I was growing up, I thought I was going to be a really contemporary artist doing video and installation work, capturing the zeitgeist and all that, but…" He pauses, laughing and shaking his head as if astounded at the folly of his younger self. "Then, I realised I was just lying to myself."

Shaw, whose mother was from Co Donegal, was brought up Catholic, which, he says, "fine-tuned his sense of being an outsider". As a teenager in the 1980s, he graduated from being a skinhead dancing to 2-Tone records to an indie kid in thrall to Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire. After obtaining a BA in fine art from Sheffield Polytechnic in 1989, "I was a bit like Tony Hancock in The Rebel, except that I was pretending to like Throbbing Gristle instead of the Specials and the Smiths. The only time I ever had any anxiety about where I come from was when I was sitting in a room with a load of middle-class art students talking about their lives. Until then, I had never thought of Tile Hill as a place I had somehow escaped out of. When I lived there, it was not a place I wanted to leave behind. It just was what it was – my life."

"I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe."

"I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for their confidence and the provisions they made for me to work freely in my medium over a protracted period. When I applied for the Guggenheim Fellowship, I wrote: “To produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation”

With these photographs, I have attempted to show a cross-section of the American population. My effort was to express it simply and without confusion. The view is personal and, therefore, various facets of American life and society have been ignored. The photographs were taken during 1955 and 1956; for the most part in large cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and in many other places during my Journey across the country. My book, containing these photographs, will be published in Paris by Robert Delpire, 1958.

I have been frequently accused of deliberately twisting subject matter to my point of view. Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others—perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness. Also, it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.

My photographs are not planned or composed in advance and I do not anticipate that the on-looker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind—something has been accomplished.

It is a different state of affairs for me to be working on assignment for a magazine. It suggests to me the feeling of a hack writer or a commercial illustrator. Since I sense that my ideas, my mind and my eye are not creating the picture but that the editors’ minds and eyes will finally determine which of my pictures will be reproduced to suit the magazines’ purposes.

I have a genuine distrust and “mefiance” toward all group activities. Mass production of uninspired photojournalism and photography without thought becomes anonymous merchandise. The air becomes infected with the “smell” of photography. If the photographer wants to be an artist, his thoughts cannot be developed overnight at the corner drugstore.

I am not a pessimist, but looking at a contemporary picture magazine makes it difficult for me to speak about the advancement of photography, since photography today is accepted without question, and is also presumed to be understood by all—even children. I feel that only the integrity of the individual photographer can raise its level.

The work of two contemporary photographers, Bill Brandt of England and the American, Walker Evans, have influenced me. When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: “To transform destiny into awareness.” One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?"

Video still from Ghost Story by Willie Doherty, 2007. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Alexander and Bonin, New York, and Matt’s Gallery, London

"Jessica Lack looks at the films of Willie Doherty whose icy portraits of conflict and paranoia in Northern Ireland are unexpectedly seductive"

In 1999, the artist and writer Jon Thompson wrote an essay in which he sought to repackage the concept of the sublime for a contemporary audience. He argued that we are merely onlookers in the incomprehensible spectacle that is modern life, stuck in a perpetual present waiting for the moment when the world astounds us. Willie Doherty's films often represent this state of being as he traps the audience in a no man's land from whence there is no release.

In his 1994 film, At the End of the Day, a car driving through the dusky Irish countryside repeatedly comes upon a roadblock. The car reverses and attempts the journey again, always with the same result. At its most basic, the barricade was a metaphor for the deadlock in the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland at the time. Likewise in Passage, made in 2006, two men are filmed aggressively striding across an urban wasteland towards each other. Both films refuse to resolve themselves, leaving the viewer frustrated and forced into a permanent state of heightened emotion.

Born in Derry in 1959, Doherty has devoted the past 30 years to making art about the Troubles. His practice has evolved from early black-and-white photographs of his home town, in which he sought to recontextualise the city away from the cliched and gritty photojournalistic images in the press, to film installations. Some focused directly on the political impasse, while others were more metaphorical, often using film noir to convey the city's chilling beauty. The Only Good One Is a Dead One, shot at night through the lamp-lit streets of Derry, captured the cool, calculating horror of organised crime as a man switches between the voice of a stalker and a victim.

Twice nominated for the Turner prize, in 1994 and 2003, Doherty's icy portraits of terrorism, conflict and paranoia are unexpectedly seductive. He often films early in the morning or at twilight, so that a scrubby lay-by or a deserted underpass shimmer with a frosty romance or a hazy amber splendour. The result is disconcerting. What is Doherty's reason for choosing such prosaic places and investing them with significance? By purposely leaving the story ambiguous, the viewer is forced to speculate on the possible horrors that might have occurred there. 

Why we like him? For Ghost Story, Doherty's study of Northern Ireland since the Good Friday agreement, in which he challenges the political desire to bury the past. The camera retraces the places he has filmed over the years as a voiceover recounts his personal recollections of the Troubles.

 Formative influence: Bloody Sunday. "It was an incredibly influential experience, and it was important for me because it was very clearly crystallized that all those photographs were unreliable." As a 12-year-old he witnessed 13 people being shot on the streets of Derry in 1972; he then watched as media reports denied the event.

Mari Bastashevski on her project 'State Business'

Pull My Donkey - A short film about Robert Frank by Charlie LeDuff

An Interview with Robert Adams