Ellen Peirson-Hagger at the New Statesman:
The development of his body of work is “completely collapsed and over-arching”, Tillmans said. To map out a logical timeline would be reductive. Though there are issues that recur, such as “the politics of representation”, women’s rights and gay rights. Tillmans came out as gay when he was 16, the summer Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” – which he describes as “the first fully out gay pop song” – was in the charts. “I feel a great sense of gratitude for having been born when and where I was,” he said, though his life has been touched by tragedy: his boyfriend, the painter Jochen Klein, died of Aids-related illnesses in 1997. Tillmans lives with HIV. He does not tend to make work specifically about the disease – 17 Years’ Supply (2014), which depicts a box full of empty pill bottles, is an exception – but his photographs have accrued a political significance in the public sphere. The Cock (Kiss), a 2002 portrait of two men kissing, was the subject of a homophobic attack when it was exhibited in Washington DC in 2006. Ten years later, when 49 people were murdered at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Florida, the image was widely circulated online by way of protest. The photograph was most recently used as the cover for Young Mungo, a gay love story by the Scottish Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart.
more here.