Jeff Wall exhibitions can feel rather mo
re like going to the cinema than to a gallery. Wall’s large scale photographic tableaux, famously displayed on huge light boxes, have their own veritable theatre, a back-lit stage that gives his wonderful, diaphanous “prose-poems” a particularly powerful presence.
Born in Vancouver, Canada, where he lives today, Wall studied at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in the ’60s and then the Courtauld Institute in London. He has also been an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and a regular teacher at the University of British Columbia. Inspired by numerous artists and writers including, Goya, Velázquez and Baudelaire, Wall turned away from painting in the ’70s and moved towards photography.
Later in a pioneering move he decided to work on creating large scale images and to recreate the effect of back-lit advertisements, which he had noticed on bus shelters, using light boxes on which he would display his translucent, cibachrome photographs. At times Wall’s photography plays out great sagas, historic scenes and directly references great paintings of the past. At others, it catches and preserves the drama of a sudden moment, captured brevity. His photographs can be comedies, lamentations, retrospective odes, social commentary or the humdrum beauty of the everyday.
We see a passerby looking ominously back behind him on a dark shadowy street, in a scene that could be taken from an old horror film. In other work, a Hokusai-esque sudden gust of wind catches up and scatters papers across the sky. We see a photograph of three young tattooed people sitting sublimely in dappled shade or a man sitting on the pavement looking away from the milk carton exploding in his clenched fist. In another we are shown a close up of a sink; the themes of Wall’s photography are highly varied.
Created much more than found, cinematic, or at times documentary rather than journalistic, Wall’s photography has often been heavily staged. Indeed, the creation of some of his work has been known to take over two years and Wall often shoots an image in sections before digitally piecing these shots together to make the final image. He famously summed up his approach with “I begin by not photographing”: much of Wall’s work springs first from something he has seen or experienced that he later feels inspired to recreate. Wall then sets to work recreating or creating this scene. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Wall started out with the intention of being a painter. He explains what changed as we begin to discuss what pushed him away from painting in the ’70s.
“I was very disappointed with my own achievements at the time. I had gone through conceptual art and things like that as a participant and observer; as a young artist rejecting, breaking away from conventional notions of modern art was very strong. I grew up in that – that was the context within which I came to be an artist.” It was from this point on, that Wall became increasingly interested in photography. He explains how this interest, which followed on from his disappointments in painting, began to grow into an idea of working on a much larger scale and how abstract art began to influence his photography and to inspire a search for greater presence and immediacy within his work.
“I wanted the image to have a presence – like a lot of the abstract art from the ’60s … Don Judd, for example. Or even a Jackson Pollock. Frank Stella. Carl Andre. I was first getting to grips with what art really was at the time they emerged. One of the things that was new about large scale work was its immediacy.” Goya and Velázquez are frequently cited as having had a particular effect on Wall’s work. Wall describes this influence as “the hyperreality of the two painters’ techniques [which] seemed to me to have an affinity with photography.”
The conversation moves on to the themes of his work. We discuss the surreal quality, the use of ambiguity, surprise and playing with the idea that the camera captures something truthful. Wall explains that he likes to “create a kind of imaginary zone of speculation” and that blurring the lines between fantasy and reality was absolutely something he felt “photography could experiment with.”
Conversation turns to the effects of technological development in photography and the tools used in post production. Famous for often using a particularly technical, intricate process to make his own images, Wall does not advocate such an approach or falsification across all genres of photography. For example, “Ordinary people’s snapshot photography. They use it on their families!” He laughs, “Birthday parties! There are now programs that you can buy that will clean up your pictures. You can put another head on your son’s body and give him a smiling face if he was frowning et cetera et cetera. Taking out all of the so called mistakes contradicts the very fact that all family photography is based on mistakes and those so called inopportune moments. Accidents, unexpected things, that’s where the charm comes in with that sort of photography!”
He is similarly free and encouraging on taking an innovative and open minded approach to rules and technical processes in art. “I think that all media, or art forms, whether it’s painting, photography, or sculpture … are so complicated, there are so many dimensions to them that it really isn’t a good idea to decide what these are. Of course there are rules like how to focus a camera, how to develop film, and all of those things … Just like there are rules about what a paintbrush is. But none of them are binding. Any could be twisted or reshaped and at any moment.”
Over the course of his career, Wall has achieved a great deal of popular acclaim. His work is widely exhibited, liked and recognised worldwide. Before I leave I want to know how he feels about his work’s popular appeal and the importance of art’s popular appeal in general: “Good art is open to anybody, regardless of their background or education, whether they have knowledge of art. My view is that it is not necessarily a virtue for any of the arts to appeal to a wide audience. It doesn’t really say anything about that art other than that it attracts the attention of large audiences, who are mostly defined by mass culture ideas – thinking that art is somehow better if more people can appreciate it is a very democratic way of thinking.”
by Yasmin Bilbeisi
edited by Tara Wheeler