Jeff Wall: Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series

by Jeff Wall (Photographer), Thierry de Duve (Editor), Arielle Pelenc (Editor)

This text examines 20 years of work by Canadian artist, Jeff Wall, whose constructed photographs of suburban landscapes and dramatic mise-en-scene explore the topography of everyday relations. He combines the scale and composition of the old masters with technology, to create huge transparencies which are exhibited on lightboxes. The book not only surveys his entire career to date, but also celebrates Wall's writings. Wall is to be the subject of surveys at MOCA, Chicago; Whitechapel, London; and Jeu de Paume, paris in 1995/1996. The book is part of a series of studies of important artists of the late-20th century. Each title offers a comprehensive survey of the artist's work, providing analyses and multiple perspectives on contemporary art and its inspiration.

Genres: Art, Photography

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 1996

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.

Reviews

[Shelby Rush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wall's posed scenes are genius: humans arranged to tell a story or inspire us to come up with our own interpretation. The landscapes are blah, and the highbrow text worthless. Take each "genius" shot and fill a page with it. Sadly, some are tiny, making me resort to my reading glasses for magnification. I wouldn't mind explanatory text, something colloquial to give background on each photo. But this blabbing on about the philosophical aspects of art are BORING to down-to-earth folks like me. I want to EXPERIENCE art, not understand all its ramifications.