‘Artist, Visionary and Thinker’ Wolfgang Tillmans Wins Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award

Wolfgang Tillmans, the photographer famed for his candid documentation of youth culture, still life portraiture, and investigations into the medium of photography, has been named the winner of this year’s Henri Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award.

Awarded to coincide with Paris Photo, which opens today, the German photographer was recognised for his “outstanding contribution to the photographic medium”.

Surrounded by an immersive installation inspired by the late Cartier-Bresson’s seminal travelogue Les Européens, Tillmans accepted the award at the annual Henri Cartier-Bresson gala. “I am very proud to be part of the lineage,” he remarked in a video posted to Instagram, of “a fantastic award named after a fantastic photographer.” 

Discussing his practice, Tillmans continued: “Even though I work in the larger field of contemporary art and my practice spans from installation to sound to video, it is almost always touching and centred around the lens, and photography is really at the heart of what I do.

“I sometimes think I’m actually just taking pictures, doing it so others don’t have to, but that’s only half the truth. I get pleasure from the experimentation of ‘Can I take a picture of this?… Is it possible to take a picture of this?’ That is an ongoing challenge and that is never answered.”

Born in the industrial western German city of Remscheid in 1968, Tillmans gained widespread international recognition in the 1990s for his raw and intimate shots of youths and their subcultures. His work helped to shape the image of a generation, culminating in his receipt of the Turner Prize in 2000—Tillmans was the first photographer and non-British artist to win the prestigious award. 

As digitalisation has increasingly reshaped the photographic medium, Tillmans’ approach to image-making has demonstrated enduring relevance and adaptability—appearing in an array of contexts from i-D magazine spreads, album covers for the Pet Shop Boys and Frank Ocean, to major retrospectives at Tate Modern, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and MoMA in New York City.

“It’s really about freedom,” the artist said about the latter retrospective at MoMA, titled To Look Without Fear, which ran from September 2022 to January 2023. “Freedom of expression comes also from the freedom of actually looking and opening up to the world—enjoying it in all its beauty and in all the downsides”.

Tillmans’ gallerist Maureen Paley told Ocula that over three decades of his prolific career, he has “proven to be an impressive artist, visionary and thinker”. Paley said the imagemaker’s awards success could attributed to his “innovative contribution” to photography. 

Following photographers Sophie Calle and Susan Meiselas, Tillmans becomes the third recipient of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Lifetime Achievement Award, which launched in 2024 to recognise creators “whose work has profoundly shaped the history of photography”.

Manila-born artist Poklong Anading was also honoured during the evening as the winner of the Foundation’s Latitudes programme, organised in collaboration with the Foundation d’enterprise Hermès and the International Centre of Photography. Known for his focus on sociopolitical and environmental subjects, Anading will receive a grant to produce a new body of work, to be exhibited at Paris’ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the ICP in New York City and in the Philippines.