“In revolutionary moments, there is no place for liberals.” says the political scientist Ivan Krastev in a podcast episode in late October 2025. He recounts how, in the years after the end of the Cold War, the proponents of liberal democracy focused on strengthening the purely regulative, non-elected parts of the liberal political order: supposedly neutral institutions like constitutional courts and central banks; the rule of law in and of itself. It was the grand era of the rules-based international order. This era is now gone.
Krastev does not rely on Putin, Trump, or Xi Jinping to make his point, nor on the self-destructive nature of neoliberalism or the fact that Western democracies were often the first to violate the international order they so wanted to uphold, from Yugoslavia to Iraq to the West Bank. Instead, Krastev hones in on the pandemic, because it was this global circumstance that proved that dramatic governmental action is possible, and that despite their tedious deliberations, even liberal democracies are capable of extraordinary action. Individuals who had devoted their lives and bodies to fighting to reduce CO2 emissions witnessed the largest drop in emissions in recorded history as global air travel was paused and factory lines halted. Those who had agitated for a radical shift in migration policy saw borders shut and mobility restricted to a degree not feasible even in times of war. Revolutionaries of all political stripes recognized: where there’s a will, there’s a way.
When I returned to the Centre Pompidou in September 2025 one last time before the start of a multi-year renovation, the weather in Paris was still nice. Rien ne nous y préparait – tout nous y préparait was the title of Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibition at the Bibliothèque publique d’information. Encompassing four decades of photographs, films, magazine features, music, and optical experiments, the retrospective filled an entire floor of the emptied-out library—6,000 square meters. Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us. I love this title because of its elegant dance around the catastrophes that eventually did come to pass: how the far-right won the culture wars and enacted its “post-liberal” revolution, how wars and genocides were normalized—the end of the liberal era.
The title leaves unanswered the question of where the agency in this historical trajectory lies, but alludes, at least, to liberal passivity. To claim that one has been prepared implies that one had no decisive role to play, no capacity to act. Many have touted Wolfgang Tillmans the perfect chronicler of liberalism at the end of history. The everydayness of his subjects, the pale colors and soft focus, the direct yet undramatic intimacy of the people, scenes, and structures he portrays—all that meshed seamlessly with the zeitgeist of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This is why his pictures seem so familiar to anyone who lived through this area. I long used a portrait of myself in front of a giant Tillmans print of crustaceans for my social media profiles (cheers to my photographer).
Two students in tank tops sit in front of the library’s entrance, giggling as they gesture toward their phones. After all these years, Paris has changed little. The notion that smartphones have enabled everyone to take pictures like Tillmans is at once a crude misrecognition of his style and the ultimate acknowledgment of his brilliance. As the smartphone became commonplace, Tillmans evolved the aesthetics of the probing snapshot, and universalized the kind of photographic self-representation that he and artists like Corinne Day or Nan Goldin had pioneered in the urban subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s. My Instagram feed is full of the casually planned “photo dumps.” Whether they know it or not, my contacts owe it all to Wolfgang T.
The breadth of Tillmans’s photographic œuvre, along with his unflinching friendliness, made him the perfect coming-of-age artist for those born in the latter stages of the twentieth century. It feels fitting that the exhibition venue has personal significance for my own coming-of-age. Almost every day in the late aughts, I stood in line with hundreds of others at the Bibliothèque publique d’information—the BPI, as everyone called it—in order to conduct research in this largest open-shelf library in the world. I wrote papers on Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin there, but I also procrastinated a lot, typed out text messages on my old Nokia, peered at others and hoped to be seen. Anyone who has studied in Paris knows that the BPI is as much catwalk as it is collection. You should wisely choose your object, perspective, and technique for great photography—and the same rules applied for flirting in the BPI. At the opening reception of Rien ne nous y préparait in June, Tillmans spoke about his gratitude for the opportunity to have his work exhibited in such an open, collaborative space. Another part of the realized utopia of the BPI was that those without a home or laptop could find a warm shelter here: the library’s computers enabled them to take part in the online life of the liberal era.
“Parliaments, as much as theaters, are deserted,” I read in Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin meant that dialogue in the bourgeois theater created the conditions for democratic (liberal?) parliamentary politics. Today’s political arena looks more like a fighting cage for mixed martial arts. (The fact that Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and a supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, recently joined Meta’s board of directors underscores the vibe shift that took place after Trump seized power.) Politics today has devolved into war, or at least feels like one. At best, it’s something more like a ferocious sporting event in which each side cheers only for their own, and longs for the other side to suffer. There’s no place in the arena for liberals. They’re cheering for the referee, Krastev jests.
The walls are covered with Tillmans’ typical mixture of smaller pictures and huge prints. I recognize many of the faces they depict. The German artist Isa Genzken lies on the beach in a red sweater, squinting in the sunlight. Chloë Sevigny holds an electric guitar, shot from a vulnerable side angle. Jodie Foster, Frank Ocean, recurring images of Lutz (Lutz Huelle) and Alex (Alexandra Bircken), Wolfgang’s muses and friends from his youth in Remscheid, whom I met earlier this year when the town’s tool museum put on an exhibition of his work. One picture draws me in for longer. It shows four young men clad in shorts, baseball hats, and t-shirts, off in their own corner at a party. One sits on a beer crate; paper cups and cigarette butts litter the ground around them; a Spreequell mineral water betrays its location in Berlin. Sommerparty 2013. 2013, I think, was when the AfD was founded as an anti-Euro “professors’ party.”
I search for clues of what was to come. Army Moscow 2008 depicts young gaunt Russian soldiers parading past a Christian Dior storefront. Empire—US/Mexico 2005 shows the outline of a checkpoint that could just as convincingly be in Jerusalem or at the edge of the European Union. The title of the installation, Memorial for the Victims of Organised Religions, speaks for itself.
The beauty of this exhibition—and perhaps the liberating feeling it evokes, too—derives from its refusal to take its own melancholy too seriously, its refusal to settle for little more than heaviness. Yes, we didn’t see it coming and yet we knew. Yes, during all these years, we didn’t want to admit it. But maybe it’s not really about us (or the young fellows at the Berlin summer party, with whom I very well could have sat). Tillmans’ most enticing pictures at the Centre Pompidou point beyond the narrow confines of the modern, Western, post-Cold War world. They capture poor but lively markets in Eastern Europe, card players in Hong Kong, steelworkers in North Rhine Westphalia, the accessories of a family planning center in a country that remains unnamed but is certainly far away. History after the end of history will be written by others. Now is the time for their revolution.
The most interesting and most perplexing tense in Indo-European languages is the future anterior, also known as the Futur II, futur antérieur, or future perfect. It describes a completed event from the perspective of the future, an intuition that will have been fulfilled. The future perfect expresses the conclusion of something that hasn’t yet begun, or the loss of something that has yet to be attained. These years were defined by this premonition. For some they were alright, and for some much worse than I was capable of understanding at the time. Rückblick mit Zuversicht und Zukunft als Perspektive, looking back with hope and seeing the future before us, is the title Wolfgang Tillmans chose for his contribution to our Reader 5. We (all) will have been free, and you (all) will have known it.
