Snap happy

These days the world is experiencing an unprecedented overload of photographs, a global glut of pictures. More and more are taken every day on smartphones and tablets. They zip around the world by the billion. When I went to Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition at Tate Modern, the galleries were full of people taking snaps of the exhibits. Some visitors posed to have their pictures taken in front of the larger ones — huge photographic prints of such diverse subjects as the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, a weed growing in a London garden and a hugely enlarged close-up of a
male bottom.

These, and a great many more, are shown in galleries with a messy, provisional look, more like a classroom or workshop than a conventional exhibition of art. It is informally, coolly contemporary: the installation is part of the message.

There are photographs all over the place: taped to the walls, in books and magazines lying on tables, dangling from bulldog clips, even occasionally hanging in frames like old-fashioned pictures.