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Billions of photos are shot every year, and about the toughest thing a photographer can do is invent an original, deeply personal, instantly recognizable visual style. In the early nineties, Wolfgang Tillmans did just that, transforming himself into a new kind of artist-photographer of modern life.

I really admire paintings that look like an actual snapshot - I think that's just extraordinary.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

I'm making the art for me first. I'm making it because these are the pictures I want to see. I'm making pictures that don't yet exist.

I do not care to put out any ideas for pictures. They are too valuable and can be appropriated by any art student, defrauding me out of a possible picture.

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.