Wolfgang Tillmans is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.

Tillmans was the first photographer – and also the first non-British person – to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize. He has also been awarded the Hasselblad Award, the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition's Charles Wollaston Award, The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography, and is an Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts London. Tillmans lives in Berlin and London.

As a teenager, he kept a scrapbook of found photographs, but he did not begin taking his own photography seriously until a year before he finished high school, when he made Lacanau (1986), an image of his own leg as he walked on a beach. From 1987 to 1988 he worked as a switchboard operator at a community help organization in Hamburg, where he used the photocopier to enlarge found media photographs. In 1988 he became involved in the local rave scene and began documenting this emerging subculture. His snapshotlike photographs of young people were subsequently published in progressive magazines such as i-D and Prinz. From 1990 to 1992 he studied at the Bournemouth & Poole College in Bournemouth, England, where he was able to keep up with rave culture in a different setting. From 1992 to 1994 he lived and worked in London, relocating to New York in 1994. During this time, he began to show more frequently, developing an exhibition style that consisted of nonhierarchical arrangements of unframed photographs tacked onto the gallery’s walls. The personal, celebratory nature of his photography took a dark turn in 1997, when his partner Jochen Klein died of AIDS; an untitled series from this period documents simple details such as a last meal and a view from the hospital window. In 2001 he made the film Lights (Body)and collaborated on a video for the pop music duo the Pet Shop Boys. Over the past decade, the artist’s photographs began to reflect a new interest in abstraction, with autonomous wire-thin cascading marks and “blushes” of color created in the darkroom. His simultaneous production of stylistically diverse portraits, landscapes, and still lifes problematizes easy description and strict categorization of his artistic activity.

Tillmans has had solo shows at the Kunsthalle Zürich (1995), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Wolfsburg, Germany (1996), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1998), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2002), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002), the Tate in London (2003 and 2008), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2006), and Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin (2008), among other venues. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including The Winter of Love at P.S. 1 in New York (1994), L’Hiver de l’amour at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1994), Human Nature at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1995), Berlin Biennale (1998), Ars Baltica Triennial of Photographic Art in Kiel, Germany (1999), Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate in London (2001), Places in the Mind: Modern Photographs from the Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2001), International Contemporary Art at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (2002), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Bilbao (2003), Venice Biennale (2005), and Carnegie International (2008). In 1995 he received the Ars Viva Prize from the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie in Bremen, Germany, and in 2000 he won the Turner Prize from the Tate in London. From 1998 to 1999 Tillmans taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg and in 2001 was made an honorary fellow at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. In 2003 he was made professor of fine art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and in 2006 began to run the London exhibition space Between Bridges.