Burg: Wolfgang Tillmans

Accept no substitutes. Wolfgang Tillmans could well be the coolest photographer on the planet, and here's the evidence. Always imitated, never bettered, he's the lens-meister of the zeitgeist, the photo-journo who went artside, a man in constant demand, moving effortlessly from magazine to fashion shoot to gallery retrospective. He creates identities, he's the brand name of hip. From Ray Gun to i-D, his images feel iconic before they're out of the fluid. I'll be your mirror, he whispers, and the Gen X-kids find themselves reflected in his always open pictures. Make your own meaning, rave about them, the artifice, the stagings, it's so close to home and snapshot-casual you could do it yourself. But you couldn't. Framing is all. Every shot is classically composed, it's just the subjects that are so Now. From the portraits that made him famous, through the still lives and landscapes (undermining the genres with every shot), this second book, with design and layout from the man himself, is high colour, dirty realist heaven. Finding the still point in the information overload, the sexuality in the machine, and the image in the image saturation, Tillmans gives us the brief epiphanies we might just remember as our own.