By Lupita Franco Peimbert

Renowned photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has been in San Francisco for the last couple of weeks, organizing his photos. He and a curator finished the layout throughout the 10-room galleries on the 7th floor at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He likes to be involved in his exhibits.

“I have been working at home for months on this, deciding what goes where, and using a small floor model I created,” he told a small group of reporters, content creators, and enthusiasts at SFMOMA.

To Look Without Fear encompasses 350 photographs over 35 years of work. It presents cities, portraits, structures, materials, the simplicity of light and photos, life, the decades one is part of, abstracts, photocopies, and thought-provoking nudity.

“These photographs took many years to unfold. When I take a photo or even in a dark room, the unfolding of these images evolves,” he says. Tillmans is known for using a 35mm regular Canon camera, and it took years for him to switch to a digital format. “I like to capture what is, what I see, and the beauty and meaning I perceive.”

The tall, sixty-something-year-old man lives in London and Berlin. In 2000, He became the first photographer and non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize from the Tate Gallery. In 2023, TIME Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

When I began looking at his exhibit, abundant with very small pieces and very large prints, I felt that a thousand stories could be in each one of them and that is precisely what the photographer expects, that the viewer finds something worth their attention and interpretation. Some photos are in grids while others reminded me of the times people decorated their homes with the photos directly pushed to the wall with Scotch tape or maybe pinned.

The super-large prints are bold in color, form, and texture. They are abstract, perhaps to incite whatever feeling the viewer is ready for. Among them is one of Tillmans’ best-known photos: “Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992). I asked him about our body and how it is sometimes uncomfortable for many people to look at. He talked about this in the video below.

This exhibit has some other photos related to nudity that took me by surprise and caused me to react in a stupor for a second. But I won’t elaborate on the experience, not to ruin it for you. Hence the exhibit is called: “To Look Without Fear.”

Many of Frank Ocean’s fans and followers will be delighted to know and see the musician’s cover for the album Blonde, as the photo was taken by Tillmans.

In the last gallery room, the photograph of a weed plant is shown at a great scale, and next to it, is the photo of a man in a Greek-like posture. Tillmans says he often works between staging and finding. “I don’t always aim to control everything in my work but also don’t let everything over to chance,” he says. “It is the interaction between chance and control that really makes my work.” In the below video, he elaborates.

“To Look Without Fear,” the artist says, “is an encouragement to use your eyes and not be afraid to look at the facts of life, and the way we are.”

The exhibit opens at the SF MOMA on Saturday, November 11, 2023, and will continue through March 2024.