THE WORK OF JEFF WALL
Born in 1946, Jeff Wall has been creating art in Vancouver, BC since the late seventies. He takes pictures as if he were making an entire film: that is, each photograph is meticulously constructed over the course of weeks, months, and sometimes years.
Wall is known for his giant-sized photographic transparencies mounted on
back-lit boxes – think bus-stop ads or X-ray screens. He specializes in elaborately composed shots that look either unfathomably complicated, or confusingly mundane. The shot below falls into the former category. Completed over the course of two years, the final image was composed from 75 different photographs, taken in two different Vancouver cemeteries and within Wall’s own studio. Wall worked with oceanographers to create the tidal pool in the open grave.
The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000
Read more about this image at
Tate Modern.
Early in Wall’s career, he began experimenting with documentary-style compositions. Because his lightbox transparencies required large-format prints, a portable camera (in the 80s, at least), couldn’t provide the clarity he required to capture candid moments on the street. Still wishing to catch the genuine, street-level vibe of the occurrences taking place around him, Wall would instead hire amateur actors to recreate street scenes in studio. The shot below, titled “Mimic” is from 1982, and recreates a racist exchange Wall observed on a Vancouver sidewalk.
“The gesture was so small,” explains Wall. “I was interested in the… physical mimesis. The white man was copying the Asian’s body. Mimesis is one of the original gestures of art.”
Wall’s words are what gives his photography added significance. Critics might be less equipped to read into Wall’s work if he wasn’t so actively doing it himself. Having served as a professor at three different colleges and universities (including UBC), Jeff Wall has published a significant amount of essays relating to photography, philosophy and art, and of course, his own work.
Take a look at the photograph below, titled “The Storyteller.” Evidently one of Wall’s most iconic works, it exemplifies his mastery of elaborate set-ups that don’t seem elaborate, but which turn out to be loaded with intentionality and significance.
The storyteller in this image is the woman in the bottom left-hand corner. Wall has stated that this woman represents “the historical crisis of the Native peoples of Canada, whose traditions of oral history have been eroded by modern life.” By setting up the shot in a typically overlooked locale, he emphasizes the distance between Native history and contemporary existence.
Wall’s writing about this work are academic and dense, using words like “archaism” and “figura” in his descriptions. His inaccessibility is charming, illustrating an enchantment with intellectual explorations, but a detachment from popular art. In a way, Wall himself is the Storyteller, passionately providing fervent lectures on photography and art, just off the beaten path.