Tillmans' abstract compositions

ARTWALK

WHEN A WOLFGANG TILLMANS exhibition was announced, I rushed to see it. I needed an adrenaline kick.

Tillmans is one of the most cerebral photographers around, and at just 38, he has moved photography to a harder place to be in, mostly because of the new kinds of ideas he delves into.

For Tillmans, not only is photography the images, but also tangible self-contained objects whose tangibility he explores visually, and with a flourish. In doing this, he teases linear documentary and street photography.

Seeing his work reproduced on the pages of a catalogue was not just any thrill, for Tillmans's photography is simultaneously about assertive individual frames and groups of images that you can connect, if your mind wants to.

In this show at the Hirschhorn, Tillman's works were highly experiential, requiring a certain stillness "" and even, dare I say it, discipline? "" to really generate and absorb your own version of them.

There is a deceptively ordinary quality to a large number of Tillman's images of people. They seem to stand lazily, allowing themselves to be present in the picture rather than posing to draw attention to themselves.

In several frames, they begin to be abstract, serving not as subjects, but as props in the frame, the larger composition. The installation of each of them, as groups, often seemingly random, removes them of a context. It is possible then to allow the mind to abstract, to wander off and take the image with it.

When this happens, the people in the photograph appear deliberate and carefully placed. Oscillating between these two versions, you generate your own comfortable, fuzzy space, an anchor for the show.

There is a lot one can write about a feted artist (he's won the Turner Award in 2000), but let's just first set our eyes on the photographs of paper, sometimes light sensitive paper, he has displayed here. One of them is folded over, as any chart paper would.

It creates, like any other paper, a closed loop. Lights bounce off it, creating a luminous, metallic-pearly effect. Tillmans is using suggestion to explore the presence of paper not only as a medium, but as an object that exerts an independent self, regardless of what it bears on its surface.

A completely different strategy comes into force in images of soldiers. In these works, photographs are themselves laid bare by the process of suggesting a pattern. From Kosovo onwards across the 1990s, the photographs of heroic soldiers "" clean and pleasant "" exude a calm. The off guard soldier, as it were.

In a flash, they gesture, if you will, to the Soviet-style Mother Russia, the motherland, all confident and heroic. Soviet crematories in the 1990s had several of these Mother Russias, marking and asserting the toll of the Second World War.

Tillmans' protagonists, the '90s soldiers, turn out to be a cliche because they've been portrayed in safe ways repeatedly. Perhaps this is indoctrination. By decoding these photographic patterns, Tillmans is unmasking this and goading "other" representations. He'd have found something of this in Jeff Wall's current MOMA show, where the photographer has created a rivetingly gruesome and borderline insane soldiers' dreamscape.

Tillmans then creates conversations that negotiate the bends of memory and association.

In the process, hierarchies within art "types" are collapsed and new individual possibilities surface.