German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans’s massive retrospective, “To Look Without Fear,” on view at SFMOMA, could just as easily have been titled “To Live Without Fear.” That’s partially because of the radical verve his subjects emote. It’s also because, for Tillmans, living and photographing are synonymous.
The roughly 400 pictures in the show span 35 years of the artist’s career and fill 10 rooms, hung floor-to-ceiling in several ways — traditional frames, tape, pins, clips, nails and directly affixed to the walls.
There’s a youthfulness in this presentation, reminiscent of a teenager’s bedroom walls, but it isn’t naive. Instead, the presentation demands direct engagement, tossing the preciousness so often found in museums in favor of a raw, lucid encounter. The pictures themselves are no different.
The first several rooms in the show largely feature Tillmans’s documentation of his social life orbiting the queer nightclub scene of 1980s and ’90s Berlin and London. He photographs everything from friends and lovers to cityscapes to penises to seedlings in a cataloging of experience that overlooks nothing.
Many photos appear unrelated, save for their proximity: a picture of a breastfeeding mother next to one of a man DJing a party; a snapshot of rainbow beside one of a man urinating onto a desk chair; the portrait of Frank Ocean that served as the cover of the R&B singer’s 2016 album “Blonde” hanging conspicuously near a subtle still life of a vase of flowers on an industrial windowsill. But this dissonant juxtaposition resonates as true to life.
Other pictures are arresting for the oddities they present. A man with his hands outstretched, mimicking the antlers of the deer standing before him, shows an almost supernatural communion. (Even more moving is to discover that the man is Tillmans’s late lover, the German painter Jochen Klein, who died of AIDS in 1997; Tillmans himself was diagnosed HIV-positive the same year). A posed picture of a straight couple is innocuous save for the fact that the woman, who is double-jointed, has crossed her arms behind her head and is clutching her own breasts.
Tillmans has seen it all and delivers his visions to us as matter-of-fact statements of the beauty humanity has to offer if one takes the time to look.
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In his “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans takes a stand for photography’s greatest political ability: objectivity. Large, plexiglass-covered tabletops are scattered with newspaper clippings, printouts of websites, photographs and ephemeral objects, tracking various issues of political unrest over the past 15 years.
While these installations risk echoing the didactic quality of much political art, Tillmans’s photographs of protestors marching in the streets worldwide to support LGBTQ+ rights and the Black Lives Matter movement powerfully humanize his politics.
“The Cock (kiss),” which shows two men kissing feverishly and is displayed amid these protest scenes, venerates the radical expression of love as the highest form of political statement.
There’s such a staggering amount of work in the exhibition that some are bound to sag. This mostly happens when Tillmans ventures outside his signature aesthetic. The 40-minute silent film “Book for Architects” examines various structures inside and out and is boring. The large-scale photographic abstractions in the “Free Swimmer” series, made by exposing photosensitive paper directly to light, come off as uninspired formalist experiments.
Vitality is the defining feature of Tillmans’s best work. “To Look Without Fear” delivers this quality in spades with the sheer volume of pictures and the thrilling range of their subjects. And while all photographers offer us some evidence of life, not all bother to remind us that we are alive. That’s Tillmans’s gift.
