Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall (born
1946) is a
Canadian photographer.
His
photographs are often carefully staged like a scene in a film, with full control of all details. Their composition is always well thought through, and often borrows from classical painters like
Edouard Manet. Wall did post graduate research with Manet expert
T J Clark at the
Courtauld Institute in
1970-73. Many of his images are large (typically 2x2 meters) transparencies placed in back-lit boxes; Wall says he got the idea during a bus trip between Spain and London where he saw large back-lit advertisements at bus stops. The themes are social and political, such as urban violence, racism, poverty, gender and class conflicts.
A typical image of Jeff Wall is
Mimic from
1982. It is a colour transparency, 198 cm by 229 cm. In it, we see three people, a couple and a man, walking towards the camera on a side walk. The street looks like a suburb in a North American town, residential area mixed with light industry. The couple, to the right in the picture, is white, and the single man to the left is of asian origin. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her bellybutton. Her boyfriend is wearing a denim vest, has a full beard and unkempt hair; they give the impression of working class. The asian man is dressed smarter, with a collared shirt; he gives the impression of being middle class. The white man is making a racist gesture by pulling the skin beside his eye outward so that it appears slanted. The picture appears to be a
candid shot that captures the moment of the gesture and the social tensions that it reveals. However it is actually one of Wall's 'cinematographic' photographs that carefully recreates a scene that Wall had previously noticed.
Born, living and working in
Vancouver,
British Columbia, Wall has been a key figure in the city's vibrant arts scene for years. Early on in his career, he helped define the so-called 'photoconceptualist' paradigm Vancouver has become famous for in contemporary art; he published major essays on the work of his close colleagues and fellow Vancouverites
Rodney Graham,
Ken Lum and
Ian Wallace, and enjoyed a short-lived stint in the city's prime art rock band
UJ3RK5. His tableaux very often take Vancouver's spectacular mixture of sublime natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern featurelessness ('Terminal City') as their generic backdrop.
In
2002, he was awarded the
Hasselblad Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada.
[1]*
Jeff Wall resources and exhibition at Tate
