Wolfgang Tillmans: 57 varieties

Wolfgang Tillmans questions ideas about beauty

German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has won over the Turner Prize jury with a rich mix of 57 strong images.

His work covers portraits, still lives and landscapes, from the poignant to the banal.

At Tate Britain his pictures cover the walls of the gallery - from small intimate pictures, little more than snapshots to much larger works.

Soldiers - the nineties by Wolfgang Tillmans

He first came to the attention of the art world in the late 1980s with a series of photographs of young people at raves and festivals.

His work appeared in influential design magazines such as i-D before he began to exhibit across Europe.

The 32-year-old was born in Remscheid, Germany and he now runs a studio in Bethnal Green in the East End of London.

He never uses frames for his images, simply pinning or taping them to the walls of the gallery.

He said this way he can avoid deliberately subverting the images' significance as art.

"I've never deployed all the things that the art world uses to make something more important," he once said.

Among his more striking images are a half-naked man urinating on to a chair and rats rummaging through city rubbish.

He explained his subject matter: "These scenarios might appear strange to some people, but I try to ask through them, what is so strange here, the scenario in the picture, the world around you, society, your ideas about beauty or my ideas about beauty?"