Jeff Wall

photographer

With his characteristic large-scale colour transparencies presented in light boxes, Jeff Wall is a pioneer of postmodern photography. Presenting elaborate staged situations through the use of ‘actors’, costumes, make-up, lighting effects and digital manipulation, Wall’s photographs present imagined truths – scenes that seem real because all the details are authentic. His role as an educator has made Canadian photography a force in the late twentieth century.
Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia. From an early age, Wall had a strong interest in art history and classical painting, which he studied extensively.
In 1962, Wall attended the American Art Exhibition at the Seattle World’s Fair, where he saw the work of painters such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. This experience inspired Wall to adopt an Abstract Expressionist approach to his own work. Later, while studying fine art at the University of British Columbia, he was drawn to the possibilities of conceptual art and moved away from painting in favour of textual work and, eventually, photography. Wall received a B.A. Honours in 1968 and an M.A. in Art History in 1970.
While still a student, his work was shown in a number of group exhibitions, including 955,000 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Lucy Lippard, and Photo Show at the S.U.B. Gallery at the University of British Columbia, curated by Christos Dikeakos, both in 1969. Photo Show juxtaposed the work of Vancouver artists such as Duane Lunden, Ian Wallace and Wall with that of Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman and Douglas Huebler. Wall and Graham, in particular, shared similar interests. They became friends and had the opportunity to work together in later years. In 1970, Wall left Canada to pursue doctoral studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
For his master’s thesis, Wall focused on Dadaism. In London, he studied the work of John Heartfield and Marcel Duchamp for his doctorate, during which time he also studied Eugène Atget and Paul Strand. Wall continued to explore his lifelong interest in cinema, and for a time he was interested in a career as a filmmaker. He stayed in London for three years, returning first to Vancouver and then to Halifax, Nova Scotia, as an assistant professor in the art history department at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 1974 to 1975.
Wall returned to Vancouver in 1976 and was appointed Associate Professor in the Centre for the Arts at Simon Fraser University until 1987. While at Simon Fraser University, Wall actively pursued his own art practice and began experimenting with backlit Cibrachrome transparencies, creating images such as Faking Death, in 1977. The following year, he produced what would be a turning point in his mature work, titled The Destroyed Room (1978). It was displayed in the window of Vancouver’s Nova Gallery in Wall’s first solo exhibition. As a number of Wall’s photographs have strong connections to classical painting and art history, this photograph can be seen as a contemporary narrative of the moments following the action in Eugéne Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). The image of a bright red room with an overturned, torn mattress, clothes strewn on the floor and smashed furniture is reminiscent of an establishing shot at the beginning of a film, where the viewer sees the aftermath of events, and later the story is developed through flashbacks. It is clear from the wreckage that something has happened, but what exactly is left ambiguous.
There are also clues that the scene is staged, such as the porcelain figure of a woman carefully placed on the dresser, and the fact that the room is actually part of a set.
An equally important work from this early period is Picture for Women (1979). As Wall had done with The Ruined Room, this second photograph quotes a painting, in this case Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (1882). The painting is in the collection of the Courtauld, which Wall would have had the opportunity to study extensively as a student. The woman in Wall’s photograph echoes the pose of the barmaid in Manet’s painting, but instead of seeing her back in the mirror behind the bar, the viewer sees Wall and his camera. Wall has featured as a subject in other works such as Double Self-Portrait (1979), but in Picture for Women he clearly problematises the position of the artist in relation to the model and the viewer, and also engages with the feminist debate that these positions have historically been gendered.
Following his breakthroughs with The Destroyed Room and Picture for Women, Wall produced a series of large-scale ‘staged’ photographs, sumptuously presented in light boxes. The origins of the staged photograph can be traced back to the nineteenth century, such as the allegorical subjects employed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron. The photographic representation of the tableau vivant stems not only from related traditions in genre and history painting, but also from the Victorian love of theatrical performances and poetry recitals. Wall’s photographs certainly bear witness to this historical legacy, but more importantly they reflect his own investigations into the evocative powers of cinematography and the persuasive authority and pervasiveness of commercial advertising.
The physical scale and luminosity emanating from Wall’s lightbox photographs is reminiscent of a cinema screen. In keeping with this relationship to film, it is interesting to note that Wall’s working method involves hiring a cast of actors or models.
While the inspiration for the images is very often something Wall has experienced or witnessed on the street, the finished photograph itself is not documentary in nature. The scenes depicted are carefully scripted and rehearsed. Wall will have the actors run through the actions over and over again until he achieves the desired effect. In this sense, his photographs can be read as even better versions of the ”real” sequence of events, because the viewer is given the benefit of Wall’s introspection. This blurring of the lines between fact and fiction is what makes his photographs so compelling, in the same way that one can be completely drawn into the actions that take place on film.
In 1987, Wall returned to his alma mater as a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a shift in Wall’s choice of subject matter. During this period, he focused less on real-life events and more on his own dreams and imagination. It was during this period that he produced important photographs such as the nightmarish bacchanalia of The Vampires’ Picnic (1991). The theatricality of this image is accentuated by the dramatically lit figures emerging from the darkness of the forest.
As with many of Wall’s photographs, the viewer expects to hear sound, and yet the moment has been taken out of time, more like a film still than a photograph, more like a Greek tragedy than a historical painting or, more precisely, a combination of all these things.
The Stumbling Block (1991) marks the introduction of computer-generated imagery into Wall’s photography.
The Stumbling Block is a busy street scene in which a passer-by turns to see a young woman stumble over an obstacle in the form of a man dressed in protective padding. On the pavement to the right is a man in business attire, who appears to have already taken a turn.
For this piece, Wall first photographed the pavement and people in the distance, and then photographed the foreground action in the studio. The results were then stitched together. It is an imagined event that seems to be based on reality because it looks so completely real. It is a postmodern allegory that Wall has described as a ‘philosophical comedy’: “In my imagination, The Stumbling Block helps people change. He is there so that ambivalent people can express their ambivalence by interrupting their habitual activities. He is an employee of the city, as you can see from the insignia on his uniform. There are many Stumbling Blocks on the streets of the city, wherever surveys have shown a need for one. He is passive, gentle and indifferent: this was my image of the perfect ”therapy bureaucrat’’.”
Despite the wide range of special effects made possible by new technology, Wall continues to produce photographs in which the utterly impossible seems entirely realistic and reasonable, as in Dead Troops Talk, 1992 (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol Near Moquor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986). This photograph is one of his most complex, with a large group of players in full make-up providing the gruesome embellishment of their mortal injuries: Wall and his crew constructed the barren hill in the studio, then photographed each group of soldiers separately, later combining them into one image through digitalisation.
This total control brings the image fully into the realm of painting and filmmaking, two disciplines in which the artist has more or less complete control over the image.
The scene Wall presents here not only recalls the grand machines of artists such as Théodore Géricault, but also alludes to the openly grotesque and uncanny in art history, to Bosch, Grunewald and Goya, but also to George Romero, Dario Argento and Hammer horror films.
The image draws on the full range of Wall’s preoccupations – art history, film and the seductive power of advertising campaigns such as those produced by Benetton. Dead Troops Talk illustrates the horrors of war while fictionalising the experience. Although the photograph borrows from the conventions of classical history painting, in Wall’s world suffering is not sacred and unifying, but pointless and ridiculous.
While Wall is undoubtedly best known for his large-scale colour work, his investigations in black and white have allowed him to confront the legacy of the documentary form in photography. In 1996, Wall produced a series of photographs of menial workers working in a hotel room or mopping floors in a lobby. These solitary figures do not engage directly with the viewer. Always rooted in his strong theoretical and art historical background, there are undeniable traces of the documentary projects of photographers such as Robert Frank and Walker Evans.
Still monumental in scale and staged, photographs such as The Volunteer (1996) and Citizen (1996) have a distinctly quieter, almost introspective quality than the colourful tableaux vivants. It was also during this period that Wall resumed his explorations of landscape and nature, producing beautifully rendered photographic studies such as A Sunflower (1995) and views of his native city and surrounding areas.
Wall has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally since 1969, and has had several solo exhibitions each year for the past 40 years. He has also been invited to participate in nearly every major contemporary art exhibition of the past few decades, including the Whitney Biennial in 1995, Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, the São Paulo Biennial in 1998, the Carnegie International in 1998, and the Sydney Biennial in 2000. His photographs are in great demand and are held in private and public collections including the Tate Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Canada; the De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Musée national d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
After a two-year sabbatical, Wall resigned from the University of British Columbia in 1999 to devote himself to the demands of his ever-increasing exhibition schedule and the production of his own work. In 2000, Wall was invited to take up a senior position at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany, a prestigious honour that has in the past been bestowed on artists such as Josef Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Bernd and Hilla Becher.