Jeff Wall: Works and Collected Writings

by Jeff Wall, Michael Newman (Contributor)

Some of the carefully staged and composed images here are digitally altered, and almost all of them were originally displayed in backlit boxes. If those strategies sound familiar, you can thank Jeff Wall, born in Vancouver in 1946 and widely recognized as one of the most adventurous and inventive artists of his generation. For more than 20 years, his outstanding pioneering work has contributed significantly to placing the medium of photography in the midst of contemporary art. He uses it to explore a wide range of social and political themes, including urban violence, racism, poverty, gender and class, history, memory and representation. His compositions in both color and black-and-white maintain a constant dialogue with nineteenth-century genre painting, and truly make him, in Charles Baudelaire's expression, "a painter of modern life." This substantial monograph collects Wall's works alongside his writings in 300 pages featuring almost 150 illustrations.

Genres: Art

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jeff Wall is a leading contemporary Canadian photographer whose work is concerned with ideas about the nature of images, representation, and memory. His large-scale photographs appropriate the visual language of advertising in their use of backlit transparencies and large scale. The subjects are “cinematographic” reconstructions of everyday moments, fiction, and art history, which he refers to as “near documentary”. “[Near documentary] means that they are pictures whose subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and accurately,” he said of his process.

Born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, he received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970. Mainly focusing on academia during the following decade, he studied with the famed British historian T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. A Conceptual artist and art historian until the 1980s, Wall began creating photographs styled after artists including Hokusai and Édouard Manet as well as novels like the Invisible Man. In 2012, a print of his image Dead Troops Talk (1993) broke auction records at Christie’s and became the third most expensive photograph ever sold at the time.

Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Wall currently lives and works in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.

Reviews

[Malik Purvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this twice now; there's some pretentiousness in it, but it's also an excellent survey of some otherwise unpenetrable work.