Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation View. (Photography courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery)

In this digital age dominated by free media-sharing and instant mobile uploads, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans restores hope in our fading ability to discern beautiful images. German-born Tillmans, known for his rapturous club photos of British i-D, brings to Andrea Rosen Gallery through March 13 a show with the full intensity and point-and-shoot bravura of those seminal nineties spreads. Pictures in the Place of Others, featuring seemingly extemporaneous snapshots of contemporary life, captures tender expressions, natural phenomena, and shimmering skylines. Witness Heptathlon, wherein Tillmans catches an athlete in momentary abandonment; in Ostgut/December Edit (at the entryway of the installation) he assembles chaos with signature panache. When so many photographs bear the markings of deliberation, Tillmans’ appear purely spontaneous. His work thus retains a captivating, timeless quality (perhaps accounting for the unlikely correlations drawn between his irreverent hipster and the Caravaggio nude). An exercise in unkept formalism, Pictures in the Place of Others finds balance in its unapologetic use of color and premeditated, if imperceptible, exhibition layout.
“In a way, to reconcile or address the randomness of the world today is the biggest task, to let it all in, but still hold course…. I’m interested in the mind being stretched by trying to pull this world of pictures together.”