Coinciding with the end of his three years in Hamburg (1987-1990) and his arrival in London to study at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art between 1990 and 1992, Wolfgang Tillmans began to get to know the world of fashion through Matthew Collin and the possibility of expressing his impulses with total freedom through the pages of publications which, like The Face or I-D, are aimed at a demanding public, eager for novelty, hungry for transgressive views and expectant about avant-garde ideas of all kinds. However, rather than a change in his production, what his work undergoes from that moment is more a consolidation of his interest in the creation of photographs half way between fashion photography and documentary reportage. An interest which had been part of his career since the eighties, but would find in publications the possibility of representing the world he lives in and freezing contemporary cultural events like the ones young people create through what is known as club culture, electronic music, street culture, etc.

Influenced by the work of Félix González-Torres and his capacity for conveying a strong emotional charge through a language close to minimalism, Tillmans maintains that the seed of any project is to be found in the things that come from our surroundings and are stored in our thoughts. Starting from that premise and a conviction that through first-hand observation of the tiny movements that take place around us we can reach the universe of stimuli that generate any work, he concentrates on the production of pieces that explicitly reflect issues such as racism, xenophobia, gay rights, the devastating effects of AIDS or the life of the homeless. A production which, moving between the creation of intimate, personal still lifes and portraits of friends or celebrities, he began to show through careful visual constructions characterised by a combination of photographs from his own crop with images or pages taken from magazines.

Deploying and showing his work as if it were a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces of all kinds, different sizes and images repeated in successive installations, what he achieves is not only to match the value of the photographic image and the one from the media like the publications, but also to avoid any possible hierarchy among the different themes and subjects his images represent.

Although Tillmans rejects any attempt to describe his work on the basis of its strong autobiographical overtones, the fact is that there are quite a few images, which, at first sight, may come from his most immediate surroundings. This is the case of Jeans on White, a work from the early nineties of great visual simplicity, and an enormous wealth of readings characterised by the presence of a pair of white jeans hanging from a half open cupboard door. Aside from what we see in the image, what makes it unique and unrepeatable is its capacity to convey what happens inside a space from the freezing of a fleeting moment and the messages that may be incrusted on the skin of a garment.