Nothing Could Have Prepared Us, Everything Could Have Prepared Us is the catalogue for Wolfgang Tillmans's carte blanche installation at the Centre Pompidou, tracing over thirty-five years of photographic practice through an experimental transformation of the Public Information Library's entire second floor.
About This Book
When the Centre Pompidou extended carte blanche to Wolfgang Tillmans to close out the programming of its Paris building, he responded not with a conventional retrospective but with an installation that made the former library both subject and site. Tillmans's arrangement of photographic works across the Bpi's second floor placed his images in dialogue with the architecture itself and with the library's historical role as a place of knowledge transmission. This catalogue documents that singular project — alternating plate spreads with installation photography to show how Tillmans claimed and activated the space. Essays by a younger generation of writers open new perspectives on his practice across photographic genres, making the book a substantive critical companion as well as an exhibition record.
Key Features
- 272 pages of plate spreads alternating with installation photography and critical essays
- Essays by a younger generation of authors, with contributions contextualised by Florian Ebner and Olga Frydryszak-Rétat of the Centre Pompidou Department of Photography
- Documents Tillmans's experimental installation occupying the entire second floor of the Bibliothèque publique d'information, Centre Pompidou
- Published by Spector Books, 2025
What You'll Discover
- How Tillmans's installation used the library's architecture as an active interlocutor, questioning the space as both structure and site of knowledge
- The logic and order Tillmans brings to hanging and sequencing — activated here in direct response to a specific institutional and spatial context
- Over thirty-five years of photographic practice surveyed across multiple genres, framed through a single, site-specific lens
- New critical writing from a younger generation of authors that recontextualises familiar aspects of Tillmans's work
About the Author
Wolfgang Tillmans is an artist based in Berlin and London whose work spans photography, installation, and publishing. A recent retrospective travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Florian Ebner, head of the Department of Photography at the Centre Pompidou, and Olga Frydryszak-Rétat, assistant curator specialising in contemporary photography, contributed to the publication.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 272
- Dimensions: 280 x 220 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783959059213
- Publisher: Spector Books
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Photographers, curators, and design practitioners interested in how contemporary artists engage institutional space — and for anyone following Tillmans's evolving practice across image-making and installation.