To feel infinity

Artwork: Wolfgang Tillmans, in flight astro (ii), 2010

Digital pigment print

Alongside photography, astronomy has played a lifelong role in Wolfgang Tillman’s search for the “boundaries of the visible”.

Tillman’ s affirms this saying,  “When I was ten or eleven…I fell in love with the stars.”

This led Tillmans to observe astronomical phenomenon such as sunspots through a telescope and placing the camera against the eyepiece to take photographs, and specifically in 2004 and 2012 he photographed the transit of Venus, the planet’s passage across the Sun over several hours.

Commenting on this fascination, he says, “Astronomy is located at the limit. Can I see something there? Is that a detail or is it just noise in the camera sensor? By going to the limits, to the borders, I find comfort in being in-between the infinite smallness of subatomic space and the infinite largeness of the cosmos. It gives me comfort to feel infinity.”

[source: Interview with Aimee Lin, Wolfgang Tillmans: On the Limits of Seeing in a High-Definition World, ArtReview Asia, 2018]