As with Goldin’s unhappy couples, his party scenes are like panes of glass dropped through the middle of symbioses. Almost violently sociable, the work retroactively mainstreams such precedents as the stark intimacies of love and loss in photographs by Nan Goldin-though the irrepressibly positive-minded Tillmans is never as downbeat as Goldin.įifty-four years old, the third child of parents who ran an export business in a city near Cologne, Tillmans soared to fame in the early nineties for work that he had begun a few years earlier: an ostensibly scattershot but, in truth, acutely selective documentation of soulful youths whom he encountered on night-life outings, chiefly in Berlin and London, before and during his art-school studies at Bournemouth, in England.

The ground zero at MOMA is “art photography,” its former autonomy diluted in a tsunami of images from Tillmans, in wildly varying sizes, mediums, and formats, which are often mounted from floor to ceiling, and may less risk than exalt banality. Criteria that once applied no longer compel. Geniuses alter the basic terms of the fields of art or science which happen to engage them. There’s a downside to the concession-it dampens my quarrels of taste with certain items, among the show’s predominantly brilliant several hundred, that I do not like.

“To look without fear,” the immense, flabbergastingly installed retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, at the Museum of Modern Art, persuades me that the man is a genius.

Darkroom booth 3