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.

Freedom From The Known is the first book to focus entirely on Wolfgang Tillmans's abstract photographs, exploring the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. It is published on the occasion of the artist's first major solo exhibition for an American museum--curated by Bob Nickas, who contributes an essay here--which opened at P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York, in the spring of 2006. Of the 25 pieces here, 24 were produced specifically for this project and had never been seen before the exhibition. Most of are "cameraless" pictures, made by the direct manipulation of light on paper, rather than on a negative. At the exhibition, each photograph was presented in a frame, which marked a departure for the artist, who pioneered installation with tape and pins. But he was right: Frames gave these elusive, transitory, abstract images coherence as objects in space, as well as both buoyancy and weight. They were accompanied by a group of figurative photographs from the 1990s series Empire, which made the shift from figure to abstraction by being passed through a photocopy or fax machine, then scanned to the highest possible resolution, turned into large-scale C-prints and framed. A selection of earlier photographs provides a context for Tillmans's passage from figurative and representational imagery to abstraction. Taken together, these more conceptual works reveal the self-reflective impulse underpinning choices of media and topic throughout his work.