Corrective lens - Letters - Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

I would like to correct the recurring misperception that I was a fashion photographer before becoming an artist, as stated in Kate Bush's article on Roe Ethridge ["All Systems Go," October 2003]. My work and the way I disseminate it have often been inaccurately associated with that of fashion and advertising photographers who "cross over" into art. In fact, I did no fashion photography before my first art exhibitions in the late '80s, and my magazine work in the early '90s was primarily portraiture and documentary, along with the occasional staged utopian scenario that had fashion credits so it could get printed. The staff and editors at magazines like i-D and Interview were quite aware of my origins as an exhibiting artist.

I had a very specific agenda; the choices about the way I published my work were made with an eye to challenging art's technical and disciplinary hierarchies. I moved my art practice partially into magazines in order to make and disseminate my work. I also just loved the beauty of the printed page; to make that point I eventually incorporated magazine pages--which I had laid out myself--into my installations of "fine" photographic prints. At no point did I intend to say that magazines and fashion per se are art (later suggested by the pointless fashion/art crossover projects that persist to this day). To me, both are fields of great excellence, and few good results have come from the act of "crossing over" for its own sake.

My magazine work was always "editorial" and limited anyway to a few independent magazines (which paid one hundred dollars a page on a good day). I consistently turned down advertising jobs and this is as true today as it was twelve years ago. It's important to clear this issue up, not because I think making a living by making art is automatically "better" than doing so through advertising, but because I perceive either that my nonexistent "past in fashion" is seen as inferior--and this attitude is the exact opposite of my own feelings toward friends in fashion design and the media--or I'm misconstrued as an apologist for fashion photographers who did desert their million-dollar commissions for "redemption" in art.

--Wolfgang Tillmans, London

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