Photographers in Focus: Jeff Wall

“The only way to continue in the spirit of the avant-garde is to experiment with your relation to tradition,” Vancouver-born photographer Jeff Wall once said about his early work. Wall, who is best known for his suspense-filled reconstructions of quotidian life, came to photography as an art historian in the 1970s. Since then his images have referenced many, seemingly disparate, things such as nineteenth-century painting, commercial advertising and street photography.

The Canadian artist’s work subverts the classic role of photography in a process he calls “near-documentary,” which embraces location-staging and digital manipulation. One of his most famous works, Mimic (1982), is a recreation of a racial incident that the artist witnessed on the streets of Vancouver, but did not capture at the time. The image has all the drama and spontaneity of street photography, but constructed with the exacting precision of a film set. This mix between artifice and truth makes viewers question the role of photography as both an art form and a documentary device.

Picture for Women (1979), another of Wall's enduring pieces, shows a woman's looking out into the distance, and is a conceptual take on Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère, a mirrored scene where a barmaid stares despondently out from the canvas. Wall’s multilayered work not only considers the oppressive nature of the male gaze, but also reflects on the act of taking a picture as he places himself and the camera within the frame.

Whether it’s an image of Bedouin olive pickers sleeping on a farm, a homeless woman under a freeway, or Russians rising from the dead during the Afghanistan war, Wall does not rely on being at the right place at the right time. Every picture he creates is deliberate, contextual and bursting with narrative—turning photography into the painting of our times.

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