This book presents the first sustained academic criticism of Turner Prize-winning photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Placing the artist's work into dialogue with art history, art and media theory, it explores how he has informed a new art discourse of autonomous “self-sufficiency” and positioned his work as an ecological practice.

Between 1987 and 2021, German artist Wolfgang Tillmans amassed an archive of more than 4000 photographs, indexed into five categories. From this archive, the artist organizes the images into unique constellations that change with every exhibition. Through a close reading of the ways in which these constellations are constructed, this book presents Tillman's approach as an ecological framework for contemporary art, and contends that the images themselves should be interpreted not as mere representations but as types of beings with their own dynamic surfaces.

The book interweaves art history with environmental humanities, to reveal how Tillman's work acts as an alternative and resistant concept for the Anthropocene, comprised of ongoing multispecies stories, diverse players, and practices. Ultimately, the “self-sufficient image” – a term Tillmans coined in a 2007 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to refer to artworks as autonomous entities – serves to explore how individual bodies and collectives come to be, and how they respond to the environmental and social challenges of our times, generating perceptions of alternatives worlds.

Drawing on extensive archival research, the book presents close analysis of artworks from Tillman's inventory, such as Approaches (1987), if one thing matters, everything matters (2003), and truth study centre (2017), publications and artists' books, notes found in the archive, the history of the artist's exhibitions from the 1990s to the present, as well as conversations between him and other artists, writers and curators.