Ordinary is such a common word but when you try to explain what it means it becomes very complicated. What makes something ordinary or normal? Something that is ordinary is generally accepted by the majority of the public to be ordinary. In other words when most people say that something is ordinary it makes it so because ordinary is really all about how you perceive something. If everyone says that a stop sign put at an intersection is ordinary than that's how people perceive that stop sign. But what happens if you put that same stop sign that everyone thinks is normal and put it in the middle of the street where there is no intersection? Now all of a sudden that same object that was perceived as normal is now "weird" or out of the ordinary. Wolfgang Tillmans has a grid of pictures that is called "Ordinary Objects". Why would he call these pictures ordinary? In the movie "American Beauty", Lester says, "Our marriage is just for show - a commercial for how normal we are." The movie shows how something that is thought to be normal really isn't; the idea that appearances are deceiving, or judging a book by its cover.
It's interesting that Wolfgang Tillmans named his group of pictures "Ordinary Objects". At first sight of the pictures there's really nothing that jumps out at you. My first impression is that they are just ordinary objects. But if you think about them and examine them than you"ll know that none of them are really that ordinary. They are all unique and different. There's really nothing ordinary about anything. The first picture in the group displays what appears to be a jacket or a pair of pants laid on the banister. This is nothing that I would consider exciting, but it's laying there in a peculiar way. It makes you wonder why would someone lay it like that, or did they mean to lay it like that, and why would they put it there. Now it's not just an ordinary object; now it has meaning behind it.