[PHOTOGRAPHY] Jeff Wall's Meticulously Constructed Photographs 📷

If figurative art seeks to capture reality with photographic precision, the Canadian artist Jeff Wall (b. 1948) instead let his photographs draw inspiration from classical painting. As his American colleague Gregory Crewdson (see my essay on him here), he prefers the large format. He's no documentary photographer, and the compositions may seem fairly simple and mundane, but they're in fact meticulously directed and often loaded with historical references. These artificial image environments where every detail is carefully planned and staged is another thing he's got in common with Crewdson. Still his photos hold such a clear sense of authenticity that I sometimes wonder if the case wasn't that he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

There's usually a quiet waiting, a silence and thoughtfulness, in Wall's images. Eyes seldom meet. We see more necks and backs than faces. Evening darkness dominates in favor of the blazing daylight.

There's something paradoxical in Wall's method. The final results are often very close to that of a snapshot, a captured moment that contains a core of several possible, simultaneous, stories - events that we as viewers start developing.

For me, his black and white, more socially critical images are the most interesting. The homeless person who leaves his temporary dining area in the forest ("Forest", 2001), or the apathetic woman waiting outside a ramshackle house ("Rear", 1997). These are more densely charged with melancholy and elevated uneventfulness, compared with many of the color photographs.

Wall's color photographs are highly cinematic, as if someone pushed the stop button in the middle of a scene. His photos are extremely expensive to produce. "In front of a night club" (2006), a street scene where the house and sidewalk are reconstructed, not as simple backdrops, but actual buildings. The same applies to "Summer Afternoon" (2013). The people living in the apartment didn't want to rent it to him, so he simply reproduced it. The process can take years, with preparation, building and editing. Wall says that he creates documents of reality, at least as real as the reality itself. His photos are never pastiches or illustration, but fixations of the mysterious space between allegory and familiarity.

One of my favorite images of Jeff Wall is an older piece, ”Picture for Women” from 1979. It's a paraphrase of a Manet painting called "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère". Wall has included himself as the vigilant photographer on the side, but the main character is a young woman, the same bored barmaid as in Manet's painting. Well, not exactly the same, but with the same attitude. It's as if Wall has pulled a thin thread from "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" and then used it to sew "Picture for Women" with. A thread that Manet has taken from life itself and made into art. Walls perfect ear for the history of art, for life and for that eternal that moves through all centuries and manifests as art, he make use of proficiently. In "A sudden gust of wind" (1993) he's referencing a famous woodcut by Hokusai.

But he also makes use of literary references. He for instance builds a scene from a chapter in Mishima's peculiar novel "Spring snow". In the wonderful image of a black man sitting in a room filled with light bulbs - he refers to Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" from 1952. A novel depicting black identity and political awareness in the early 1900s.

It's said that Wall revolutionized the art of photography, but to determine that we have to wait at least a hundred years. At the very least he extended the possibilities of photography. Wall manages to connect an aesthetic surface with the precipitous depths of humans. It's rather special to experience his images live in exhibition. Tableaux, he calls them, huge pictures, several of them displayed in light boxes. Sometimes I wish all photos would be exhibited this way, with all the details and gestures back-lit.

Something else that's fascinating and radically different with Wall's images is that they don't display themselves theatrically for the viewer, but are rather turning away from the viewer. We see the backs of people and our vision is blocked by obstacles or darkness, which is depriving the viewer of any human reference points. This only reinforces the images demand to be regarded, perhaps even investigated and understood.

For "A view from an apartment" Wall rented an apartment and paid a woman to stay there, gave her money to decorate it, to then recreate the moment in a controlled environment; a laboratory for the production of reality? Reality or duplicate? It's hard to know when it comes to Jeff Wall.

Wall's reconstructions have a certain universal resonance to them. We don't need to be directly present in the environments, or even recognize them. It's enough to feel the uncertainty of the stagnant, as in "Men waiting". Or imagine what might lie below the surface, as in the pure "A view from an apartment".

We might also experience strong anxiety that creeps up on us when we see how the boy falls headlong from the tree, in one of his few dramatic images, "Boy falls from tree". We are in the middle of an occurring accident. The boy's body is mid air, his arms reflexively splayed out like a falling cat. The environment exudes desolation: the manicured lawn, the neat tool shed that suggests a middle-class residential area. There are no adults around to prevent the accident. It's perhaps this absence and vulnerability that has always been central in Jeff Wall's photos. I see the same story everywhere - in the enigmatic scenography that surrounds the three men in "Monologue", and in the homeless camp on the flooded parking lot in "Night".

There's often a surreal and magical quality in Wall's images that is easily overlooked. In "The flooded grave", for example, the scene from the desolate cemetery gets a magic shimmer from the water-filled grave in the foreground. Starfish and corals cover the bottom.

Wall's personal universe is full of implied miniature stories where man is at the mercy of a time that never seems to get its redemption. His attempt to capture this existential dead time seems to be his way to answer the question of how it's possible to take photography as an art form any further in a world that is barely visible through the dense jungle of images that cover our present time.

— SteemSwede (art historian, forensic psychologist & painter)

 Jeff Wall Interview: Pictures Like Poems