| The photographers of 1978 were searching for new visual territory. By that year, with Diane Arbus dead for more than half a decade, the decisive moments captured by the likes of Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand over the past three decades had been depleted of fresh potential. Street photographers, it seemed, had run out of streets to cover. But if the art of framing found subjects with a quick-eyed lens was waning by the late 70s, Jeff Wall made photography new again by extracting the medium from the well-trampled city blocks of its mid-20th-century renaissance and moving it back into the studio. The results were monumental—not only for the ripple effect they caused in the art world, but in their literal size. |  |
Mai Wang
Jeff Wall’s recent cross-country retrospective was featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The photographers of 1978 were searching for new visual territory. By that year, with Diane Arbus dead for more than half a decade, the decisive moments captured by the likes of Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand over the past three decades had been depleted of fresh potential. Street photographers, it seemed, had run out of streets to cover. If the art of framing found subjects with a quick-eyed lens was waning by the late 70s, Jeff Wall made photography new again by extracting the medium from the well-trampled city blocks of its mid-20th-century renaissance and moving it back into the studio. The results were monumental—not only for the ripple effect they caused in the art world, but in their literal size.
A giant transparency set in an aluminum lightbox, Jeff Wall’s The Destroyed Room marked a turning point in the reigning photographic climate as the documentary impulse made way for the staged. Photographers were increasingly drawn to the artificial and manipulated—scenarios created for the camera, not simply recorded by it—and Wall was their banner figure. The Destroyed Room, his breakthrough image, was built to look deconstructed: unpaired stilettos, cheap plastic bracelets, and crumpled scarves surround an overturned table, with a ripped blue mattress propped on its side. The domestic chaos portrayed in the image invites viewers to invent stories of nervous breakdowns and hair-ripping encounters—until we see the stage door and the plywood columns to the left. Suddenly, the whole roomful of wreckage takes on a crafted air, and the photographer’s role in selecting and arranging the props featured on the set becomes the central focus of the picture.
Wall’s choice of objects in The Destroyed Room collectively forms a critique of conventional femininity as it was understood in 1978. The photographer has said in subsequent interviews that he follows Baudelaire’s notion that the artist should depict scenes from modern life. With this in mind, we can forgive Wall for his artifice. The person-less, disheveled picture imparts the sense of a real-time crisis in female identity no less potent for its being a specific recreation of a general malaise. And if it treated contemporary issues, The Destroyed Room was also built on historical allusion. Despite Wall’s innovative set-up, his image did not spell a severance from artistic tradition so much as it echoed a different time and medium. To achieve his dramatic effect, Wall jumped over his immediate photographic predecessors and returned to the 19th-century theatrics of painters such as Manet, Courbet, and especially Delacroix, whose Death of Sardanapalus was the direct inspiration behind his composition.
All of Wall’s early work shared The Destroyed Room’s monumental scale and revealing use of color. His life-sized images dwarfed the old 8-by-10s of darkroom photographs, and at a time when other “art” photographers consigned color to the realm of commercial photography, Wall was unafraid to work in hues other than black, white, or gray. Yet his palette was never jarring. Take, for instance, the muted browns and denim blues of Double Self-Portrait (1979). Wall’s bleached-out color scheme served to underscore the drab persistence of the real conditions—loneliness, hostility, self-division—that lurked behind this staged picture of two figures, both the artist himself. In an era when photography had just expanded beyond the traditional printing techniques of 35-mm film, Wall readily gave himself over to the possibilities of photomontage, creating a seamless image that anticipated the Photoshop editing of the digital age. The subjects’ carefully calibrated positions suggest a picture born out of a rigid aesthetic that dictated everything from the placement of the hand on the right twin’s arm to the angle at which the left twin’s shoulders turn away from the camera. The two men, instead of examining each other, are appraising the viewer, or perhaps the camera lens, with a disdainful look that contains the suggestion of a formal confrontation unhidden by their faux-casual poses. Wall never wanted his viewers to feel comfortable in their visual encounters. Instead of judging the picture, we’re the ones left feeling judged.
Though Wall later experimented with straight photography in landscapes such as Coastal Motifs (1989) and still-lifes such as An Octopus and Some Beans (both from 1990), the photographer remains best known for his cinematographic work, images which subvert the viewer’s inherited notion that photographs arise when the shifting, complex world magically clarifies itself in front of the shutter. Wall’s totemic images seek to provoke real reactions—of curiosity, indignation, and occasional befuddlement—through their crafted fictions. That’s not to imply that these works don’t have a basis in an observed reality, because they often do. Mimic (1982), for example, was conceived of as a latter-day reconstruction of a scene observed by Wall on a Vancouver street. A white man pulls back one taut eyelid in a gesture of racial taunting as an Asian stranger walks beside him. Wall hired paid subjects to reenact this memory, and he has called the image “near documentary” in its style. Thus, one man mimics the face of another, and the whole picture mimics a found moment. The title of the work speaks to the process of photographing itself, which at best can only provide a perfect imitation of reality, even in its strictest form of reportage.
Not all of Wall’s pictures lend themselves to easy social allegories. In Milk (1984), the narrative becomes more ambiguous. A young man sits in frozen disregard beneath a brick wall as the carton of milk in his hand spills out. Has he been dispossessed of home and other domestic comforts, or is this simply a moment of disgruntled repose? The image itself offers no clarification, and we’re left with an incomplete story open to multiple interpretations. But before we can fill in the gaps, the cascade of milk arrests our attention, a frenzied white arch permanently frozen mid-air. That the spillage was staged doesn’t undermine its testimony to photography’s documentary powers, powers that were expanding at the time to include the preconceived along with the spontaneous.
“I think that’s what people in the 70s and 80s really worked on,” Wall said in a recent interview with David Shapiro. “Not to deny the validity of documentary photography, but to investigate potentials that were blocked before, blocked by a kind of orthodoxy about what photography really was.” In Wall’s view, no one could circumscribe the proper scope of photography, and what the medium could be was more exciting than what it had been. As he built his carefully pieced-together stories for the camera, Wall revealed to us that the fascination of these new photographs lay as much in their hinted truths as in their ultimate untruths.
