PHOTO: Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall’s work synthesizes the essentials of photography with elements from other art forms (including painting, cinema, and literature) in a complex mode that he calls “cinematography”. His pictures range from classical reportage to elaborate constructions and montages, usually produced at the larger scale traditionally identified with painting.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: White Cube Archive

Comprising both new and earlier photographs spanning a twenty-year period, Jeff Wall’s solo exhibition foregrounds attention to the forms and methods of picture making and his prolonged observation of everyday life. Since the 1980s, Wall has made documentary photographs alongside what he terms ‘cinematographic’ pictures, all of which emerge from similar processes of study and reflection. “Trap Set” (2021) was taken during mink season on a cold February day in the suburbs of Wall’s native Vancouver. Animal traps, one of mankind’s oldest devices, remind us of our original cunning intelligence. The equally cleverly designed “Playground Structure” (2008) depicts another contraption waiting for its users, in this case, children at play, possibly those living in the suburban houses in the background. “Pawnshop” (2009) reflects the ‘near-documentary’ approach that has been a central aspect of Wall’s work for forty years. The cubicles of the pawn shop’s interior, which resemble confession booths or changing rooms, not only provide isolation and privacy but also perhaps reflect the almost ritualistic function of this emporium where people can borrow against the value of even small items of personal property, often as a last resort. The exhibition includes several black and white prints, including “Cold Storage” (2007) and “Burrow” (2004). A new picture, “A woman with a necklace” (2021) shows a woman reclining languidly in a shadowy interior examining a sparkling glass necklace. Derived from Wall’s own memories of his childhood home, this study in light and shadow, like all of Wall’s black and white pictures, draws attention to the possibilities of picture making without colour, and to the intense luminosity that the monochrome offers. “Band & crowd” (2011) involved ‘open-ended orchestration’ whereby Wall hired a band to play a concert in front of a sparse audience and recorded the results. The image is one of Wall’s largest, taking in almost the entirety of the old and worn meeting hall. Several recent pictures in the exhibition were made in Los Angeles, where Wall also lives and works. “Man at a Mirror “(2019) features a man in a hotel room looking into a mirror on which a message has been written in soap. The camera angle ensures that the message remains indecipherable, and it cannot be determined if the man is its writer. “Sunseeker” (2021), and “Mask maker” (2015), also depict witnessed scenes. “Sunseeker” is an image of a woman dressed in black, sitting cross-legged on the roof of her car under strong sunlight. Face turned skywards and in a pose of meditation, she looks eccentric yet self-assured. In Mask maker” a man dressed in a colorful outfit, decorates the half-mask he’s wearing with a colored pen, using his reflection in a shop window. The picture’s spontaneous realism contrasts with its carnivalesque tension; the record of an action that is private, purposeful but almost alarming.

Jeff Wall is renowned for large-format photographs with subject matter that ranges from mundane corners of the urban environment, to elaborate tableaux that take on the scale and complexity of 19th-century history paintings. Wall struck on the idea of producing large, backlit photographs after seeing an illuminated advertisement from a bus window. Having recently been to the Prado, Madrid, the artist combined his knowledge of the Western pictorial tradition – he had studied art history at London’s Courtauld Institute – with his interest in contemporary media, to create one of most influential visions in contemporary art. Wall calls his photographs “prose poems”, after the writings of Charles Baudelaire, a description that emphasises how each picture should be experienced rather than understood as an illustration of a specific narrative. His pictures may depict an instant in a scenario, but the before and after that moment are left unknown, allowing them to remain open to multiple interpretations. The prose poem format allows any truth claims for the photograph – the facts we expect from journalistic photography – to remain suspended, and Wall believes that in that state of suspension the viewer experiences pleasure. In addition to the light-boxes, Wall has made, since 1996, black-and-white prints and large-scale color inkjet photographs.

Photo: Jeff Wall, Sunseeker, 2021, Inkjet print, 47 15/16 × 54 15/16 × 2 5/16 in. (121.8 × 139.6 × 5.8 cm) (framed), © Jeff Wall, Courtesy the artist and White Cube

Info: White Cube Mason’s Yard, 25-26 Mason’s Yard, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 27/4-25/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com