© Guy Tillim, Taurita, Tahiti. 2010.
Huis Marseille Keizersgracht 401,The Netherlands 1016 EK Amsterdam Pays-Bas
The photographs that Guy Tillim made last year in French Polynesia and São Paulo bring these locations into sharp focus but are devoid of specific emphasis. The weather conditions on a misty Tahiti volcanic beach are depicted in extraordinary, almost palpable detail, but the image shows no traces of the usual idiom for depicting a tropical idyll. After all, this island exists in the Western imagination in terms of its remote, exotic location, dazzling beaches, azure waters, and dusky naked beauties. Guy Tillim, however, gives a new context to this landscape.
As a modernistic counterpoint to his photographs of Polynesia, in late 2011 Guy Tillim travelled to São Paulo – a city that has also been much extolled, filmed, and described, and which is the subject of numerous poems. Here, too, Tillim has sought a new way of photographing a city of which it has been said that ‘its total absence of personality has become its personality.’ Guy Tillim approaches this metropolitan landscape in the same way he approaches Polynesian nature: “I show a sort of indeterminate area. The things that we don’t notice, as they are quotidian things. They contribute as much to the landscape as the other things.”
It is his unique photographic approach, which constantly depicts his subjects anew, that allows Guy Tillim to push back the borders of our own perceptions.
Image : © Guy Tillim