by Luca Fiore
Jeff Wall made his debut as an artist in 1978 with The Destroyed Room, a monumental color photograph (159 x 234 cm) printed on transparency and mounted on a lightbox. It shows a red-walled bedroom whose furnishings have been ravaged by some mysterious force. What we see is a chaos meticulously reconstructed, and the slash across the mattress at the center of the scene feels like both a physical and psychological wound. The large scale, the lightbox, and the mise-en-scène would become Wall’s signature features—at least until the late 1990s, when he “returned” first to analog, then to digital prints.
Although Wall’s complete oeuvre comprises no more than two hundred works, the 55 pieces exhibited in the major retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel represent one of those rare cases in which quantity truly matches quality. The selection made by curator Martin Schwander—on view until April 21—offers a highly representative survey of the trajectory that has made Wall one of the most significant figures in art photography worldwide.
Having studied art history in London, Wall came of age amid the ferment of American conceptual art in the 1960s and ’70s. He absorbed the works of the New York School, read Clement Greenberg, digested Pop Art, and studied the great masters of European painting. His choices—both formal and thematic—form a tangle of continuities and discontinuities with the artistic trends that preceded him and with the history of photography itself.
It has often been said that his work derives directly from nineteenth-century painting, but for Wall this is only a partial truth. As he wrote in Artforum in 2003 (republished in Gestus. Scritti sull’arte e la fotografia, Quodlibet Abitare, 2013):
“People who write about art often think my work always derives in some direct way from the model of nineteenth-century painting. That’s partly true, but it has been isolated and exaggerated in much of the critical response to what I’m doing. I’m totally uninterested in making reference to the genres of earlier pictorial art. I extracted two things, primarily, from the Western pictorial tradition up through the nineteenth century: a love of pictures, which I believe is at the same time a love of nature and of existence itself, and an idea of the size and scale proper to pictorial art, and so proper to the ethical feeling for the world expressed in pictorial art.”
For the artist, it is essential to create images in which objects and figures appear roughly at the same scale as the viewer. As he puts it, “life scale is a central element in any judgment of an appropriate scale.” This concern links him to the painters of the New York School, for whom monumentality—previously unexplored by art photography—was a means to convey the physicality of the creative act. The use of the lightbox also gives Wall’s images a distinctly physical presence: the illuminated box projects nearly thirty centimeters from the wall, reaching out toward the viewer, and the image, instead of reflecting light, becomes a source of light itself.
The technique, borrowed from advertising, aligns him superficially with the Pop sensibility, though Wall’s interests are quite different: he has little to do with consumer society. Each of his works is conceived as a self-contained event—there are no “series” or “cycles.” In this sense, Schwander’s choice to organize the exhibition around thematic rooms allows viewers to trace unexpected affinities and contrasts throughout the artist’s career.
Although Wall’s work is often categorized as staged photography, he rejects this label, preferring instead the term cinematography. He feels his creative process is closer to that of a film director: he interacts with his subjects (rarely professional actors) and constructs his sets with painstaking care. This approach—demanding in both time and resources—contrasts sharply with the leaner methods of “documentary style” photographers such as Walker Evans. Wall uses it to depict what he calls gestures: poses or actions that invite shared meaning.
In Mimic (1982), we see a street scene: a man walks past another who, holding hands with a woman, stares at him menacingly while raising a middle finger to his temple. In Milk (1984), a man sits on the ground, holding a milk carton that bursts open, releasing a spray of white liquid—an abstract shape suspended in midair. In Boy Falls from Tree (2010), a boy is caught mid-fall, frozen in the instant before he hits the ground. These images seem to capture something akin to the “decisive moment” beloved by humanist reportage, yet they are anything but spontaneous. Through his cinematography, Wall restages episodes he has actually witnessed, reconstructing them so that they appear both perfectly composed and seemingly candid. He calls this the near documentary dimension of his work.
Usually, photography evokes memory; here, the process is reversed—the artist’s memory generates the photograph. In documentary practice, a real event produces a subjective response in the viewer; in Wall’s work, a subjective recollection gives rise to an image that attains the status of a shared gesture.
Not all of Wall’s photographs, however, emerge in this way. Many are rooted in a more traditional sense of documentation: Vancouver landscapes, urban details, interior fragments, real-life situations. These works demonstrate the versatility of an artist who has deliberately avoided cultivating a personal “style” that would make him easily recognizable.
At times, Wall invents entirely imaginary situations. In The Flooded Grave (1998–2000), we see an open grave in the foreground of a cemetery. In the background, other tombs, trees, and a few birds in the sky. The pit is filled with water, beside it the mound of freshly dug earth. Only upon closer inspection do we notice that the water teems with marine life—fish, plants—subtly transforming the meaning of the entire image. The photograph was produced by superimposing two negatives: one taken in the cemetery, the other in Wall’s studio.
It is to this last category of images that Wall’s two most celebrated works belong: A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) (1993) and After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000).
In the first, we see a flat, open landscape in which four figures in the foreground are frozen as they react to a sudden gust of wind. The movement of air is suggested not only by the slant of two thin trees but also by the sheets of paper flying from a folder held by the man on the left. As the title declares, it is an après after the Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). The picture was created as a digital photomontage assembled over the course of five months, resulting in a classically composed image that invites metaphorical reading.
The second photograph—also included in the Basel show—is inspired by the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award. In those pages, Ellison describes the underground room in which the protagonist lives for years in New York, a space of voluntary exile. The author gives few details of the place but emphasizes one essential fact: the invisible man has covered the ceiling with 1,369 light bulbs. “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I love light,” says the man who symbolizes the condition of Black marginalization. “I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. … Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”
Wall’s photograph turns that passage into a visual manifesto—one that synthesizes not only his fascination with a certain kind of social and existential experience, but also stages the very definition of photography itself.
Luca Fiore | Writing on Contemporary Art and Photography 