Jeff Wall: Tableaux, Pictures, Photographs 1996-2013

by Jeff Wall (Photographer), Hripsimé Visser (Editor), Yilmas Dziewior (Editor)

Jeff Wall (born 1946) is both one of the most innovative and classic photographers of his generation. He became well known in the 1970s for his large-format transparencies, backlit by fluorescent lightboxes. His subject matter is varied and wide-ranging, based on situations experienced by the artist that are then recreated for the camera. Wall's combination of color prints and lightbox images, which he calls "cinematic" photographs, were completely novel and somewhat controversial when he first used only black-and-white photographs were considered appropriate for a serious museum exhibit. In 1996, Wall expanded his repertoire to begin producing monochrome images, further exploring the cinematographic--particularly film noir--and the aesthetics of classic photography. This volume, accompanying a Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibition, begins with these monochrome pictures and continues through the present. Many of the works are reproduced here for the first time.

Genres: Art

140 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2014

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.