Accept no substitutes: Wolfgang Tillmans could well be the coolest photographer on the planet. Always imitated, never bettered, he's the lens-meister of the zeitgeist, the photo-journo who went artside, a man in constant demand, moving effortlessly from magazine to fashion shoot to gallery retrospective. He creates identities, he's the brand name of hip. From Ray Gun to i-D, his images feel iconic before they're out of the fluid. I'll be your mirror, he whispers, and the Gen X-kids find themselves reflected in his always open pictures.

Make your own meaning, rave about them, the artifice, the stagings, it's so close to home and snapshot-casual you could do it yourself. But you couldn't. Framing is all. Every shot is classically composed, it's just the subjects that are so Now. From the portraits that made him famous, through the still lives and landscapes (undermining the genres with every shot), this book is high colour, dirty realist heaven. Finding the still point in the information overload, the sexuality in the machine, and the image in the image saturation, Tillmans gives us the brief epiphanies we might just remember as our own.

For artist Wolfgang Tillmans, portraiture is a collaborative process between photographer and accomplice. While Tillmans' photographs are often referred to as casual, they are actually the result of a carefully constructed process of engagement with his models. Each sitter, be they a world-famous rock star or a family member, issues forth both vulnerability and dignity. Presented here are a selection of some of the best of these portraits, taken between 1988 to 2001, and chosen by Tillmans himself. Subjects include filmmaker John Waters, architect Rem Koolhaas, musicians Moby and Michael Stipe, actresses Irm Hermann and Chloe Sevigny, as well as the artist's family and friends. As a photographer, the German-born Tillmans is, in Charles Baudlaire's famous phrase, a "painter of modern life." His infinitely controlled, casual-looking pictures of people, pets, fashion models, cast-off clothes, and rock bands capture a floating, fleeting world, doomed to pass, but for us eternal. His medium is unimportant. He could be a painter or a filmmaker. Really he is a novelist who tells us tales of what it is like to be alive right here, right now, and this feels wonderful. --Jerry Saltz, "The Village Voice" Tillmans is among the most potent and provocative portraitists of our time. --Carlo McCormick, artnet.com

Essay by Wolfgang Tillmans.

9.25 x 12 in.

68 color illustrations