Wolfgang Tillmans | Concord

Wolfgang Tillmans

Concord

Köln, Germany: Walther König, 1997

128 pp., 6.3 x 0.4 x 9.4", softcover

Edition size unknown

The first edition is often listed for hundreds of dollars, but Tillmans' Concord is still in print (it's fifth printing) and can be purchased here for $25. 

According to the photographer “for the chosen few, flying Concorde is apparently a glamorous but cramped and slightly boring routine while to watch it in air, landing or taking off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of the desire to overcome time and distance through technology.” Other than this inner-front flap description, there is no text in Concord. It consists of 62 color photographs of the Concorde airplane―taking off, landing or in flight. 

"When I embarked on making these pictures, I didn't ask BA or Heathrow airport for special access because it was important to me that I maintain a democratic perspective about this super exclusive airliner. I was more interested in how it functioned for thousands of people, who were surprised by its presence in the sky (and its roar) every day, who could project their personal ideas and dreams of a better future, of technology overcoming time and space on to it.

Knowing its timetable, I waited for Concorde at different spots under its London flight path and around Heathrow. As the plane was my focus, this strategy created a randomness in choice of location and the cityscapes I caught on the pictures. I got off wherever I guessed a public transport route might cross the flight path. Even though it is a work mainly about the sky and the super-future plane in it, Concorde became also a land- and cityscape project. One element, the plane, constitutes a historical constant in all pictures, while on the ground fragments of different times creep into the frame: a pebble-dashed house from the 50s or 60s, a post-modern 80s housing development, the British motorway signage, a Victorian brick railway bridge, a 90s Audi car. Of course, the 60s futuristic design always wins out. Also, pure landscapes emerged: the camera pressed against the perimeter fence of Heathrow only saw grassland with a distant bird lifting off.

I experienced great personal happiness when I worked on these photographs, and I was subtly aware that what I had with my late partner, the painter Jochen Klein, was a great "concord" – "an agreement of feelings", "a harmony in music" as Wikipedia defines the word. The plane was a co-development and production of two European countries, France and the UK. It's curious that today there is talk of less agreement in Europe, even of burying the idea completely. The beauty of Concorde, though flawed by its disastrous environmental record, is a reminder of what is possible, when two come together to make something bigger than what each alone could achieve.

I released Concorde in 1997 almost simultaneously as a wall-based grid of modest-sized prints in an edition of 10, as well as a book, which is currently in its sold-out fourth print run. The bookwork plays with sequencing interrupted and reversed time; the wall-based version of the work is an important transitional moment between abstraction and figuration in my practice. From 1998 I began to display non-figurative photographs, showing gradations of colour, as well as shapes that are somewhat reminiscent of reality, but which are purely created by light in the darkroom, without the use of a camera. I felt this was a natural development in my work, but instead it was initially seen as a rupture.

Landscape paintings and photographs, which involve the sky, and to some extent the sea, are always close to abstraction. They are a framing of the unframable, of an infinite expanse, infinite until it hits the horizon. When depicted without horizon, a cloudless sky or an evenly clouded sky is an abstraction of itself, a colourfield on canvas or paper, which the eye reads as "sky". It is also realistic and concrete, because that is what the sky looks like sometimes – pure solid colour or a gradation of colours. We assume it is the sky we are looking at, but it is actually only colour on paper. It is an abstraction grounded in the real world."

- Wolfgang Tillmans