Snap happy

These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are taken every day on smartphones and tablets. They zip around the world by the billion. When I went to Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at Tate Modern, the galleries were full of people taking snaps of the exhibits. Some visitors posed to have their pictures taken in front of the larger ones — huge photographic prints of such diverse subjects as the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, a weed growing in a London garden and a hugely enlarged close-up of a
male bottom.

These, and a great many more, are shown in galleries with a messy, provisional look, more like a classroom or workshop than a conventional exhibition of art. It is informally, coolly contemporary: the installation is part of the message.

There are photographs all over the place: taped to the walls, in books and magazines lying on tables, dangling from bulldog clips, even occasionally hanging in frames like old-fashioned pictures. They come in all sizes, from very big to quite small, and in all manner of genres: abstract, document-ary, portrait, still life. In the last category is a study of Tillmans’s desk, which is moderately, though not excessively, cluttered with cigarettes, ashtrays, screens, sticky-tape dispensers and a bottle of beer. He obviously likes a bit of a jumble.

One takes the point about this messy installation — a Tillmans trademark. It emphasises that photographs are not simply just pictures to hang on a hook and admire.

Born in Germany in 1968, Tillmans was the first non-Briton to win the Turner Prize — in 2000 — and is also sometimes tagged as the first photographer to do so. It would be more accurate, though, to describe him as an artist, partly a conceptual one, who uses photographic media.