Jeff Wall: North and West

by Jeff Wall (Artist), Aaron Peck (Contributor)

Jeff Wall has lived in his hometown of Vancouver for all but four years of his life. Most of the images he has created are shot in and around that city, yet his art transcends these local subjects and addresses universal themes of history and memory. That explains why his work is celebrated around the world and has been the subject of countless international exhibitions from the Tate Modern, to MoMa, to the Art Institute of Chicago. His importance to photoconceptualism is recognized throughout the art world and his cinematographic pictures are immensely popular with the public and the academy alike.

The images he has chosen for North and West explore the meaning of history and how we remember the cities we inhabit. The towns imprinted in our minds no longer exist. Urban landscapes constantly change but the remnants of the past remain and history’s influence never ends. North and West is a succinct and indispensable look into the profoundly moving and influential oeuvre of Jeff Wall.

Genres: Nonfiction

64 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 2016

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.