It is remarkable how many pictures we have [...] of informal and spontaneous
sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, holidays and
vacation travel. These urban idylls [...] presuppose the cultivation of these
pleasures as the highest field of freedom for an enlightened bourgeois
detached from the official beliefs of his class. In enjoying realistic pictures
of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing atmospheres, the
cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspects that mobility of
the environment, the market and of industry to which he owes his income and
his freedom. [...] As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted
from community, family and church to commercialised or privately improvised
forms - the streets, the cafés and resorts - the resulting consciousness of
individual freedom involved more and more an estrangement from older
ties; and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the
norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, were
spiritually torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous
indifferent mass. ¹

Pull open the door to one of Wolfgang Tillmans's exhibitions, such as the recent one at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and you find yourself literally engulfed by an enormous, book-length and building-sized photo-essay. ² The arrangement of pictures is aggressively art directed, with the four edges of the museum's rectangular walls - nay, of whole rectangular rooms - used to anchor dynamic compositions. Exposed white space around and between photographs appears no longer 'neutral' but aesthetically activated; doorways, windows, even thermostats and fire extinguishers get enlisted as graphic elements. Squint and