226 Stallabrass Museum Photography and Museum Prose

julian stallabrass
MUSEUM PHOTOGRAPHY
AND MUSEUM PROSE
T
he status of photography in the museum has changed
radically over the last twenty years.1 What had been a mar-
ginalized, minor and irregularly seen medium has become
one of the major staples of museum display, and has taken its
place alongside painting in terms of scale, sophistication and expense.
The defence of photographic work in criticism and art history has
acquired much of the portentousness and high seriousness that were
once reserved for painting. This extraordinary development raises
various questions: what has the museum done to photography in this
accommodation (as well as vice versa)?2 How has it been framed, liter-
ally and conceptually? What are its viewers encouraged to think about
it, and how? Has there emerged a form of photography, distinct from
the mass of photographic production, that it is worth calling ‘museum
photography’? One way to get a hold on these questions is to examine
the remarkable career of Jeff Wall.
Wall, born in 1946, is one of the most prominent photographic artists

on the contemporary art scene, and indeed one of the most success-
ful artists working in any medium. His largest retrospective yet was
held in 2005 in the vast spaces of the Schaulager, Basel, and was fol-
lowed by a sequence of exhibitions in premier art spaces around the
world (including moma, Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago and
the Guggenheim Berlin), and the publication of a catalogue raisonné of
his photographic work to date, along with a collection of his writings.3
But what is striking is not merely the production of the standard litera-
ture that would surround the reputation of any successful artist, but the
degree to which his work attracts academic attention. An entire number
of the Oxford Art Journal was devoted solely to its examination. In a
new left review 65 sept oct 2010 93

94 nlr 65
special issue of Art History about ‘Photography after Conceptual Art’,

no fewer than three of the ten articles carried substantial discussions of
Wall. He has received sympathetic treatment from such figures as Hans
Belting, Jean-François Chevrier and Michael Newman.4 More recently,
Wall has been taken as the major, and paradigmatic, figure of Michael
Fried’s attempt to refashion the discussion of museum photography in
the light of the themes that have sustained his writings since the 1960s:
theatricality and absorption.5 Wall is the ideal figure to examine here,
not merely because he was one of the first prominent museum photo-
graphers but because his work has been most successful in generating a
museum prose of the photograph.
Wall is unusual, among major artists, both in having academic training

at doctoral level in art history, and in not migrating to one of the great
international art centres, remaining in his native Vancouver, which has
its own distinct and fertile art scene (one that counts Stan Douglas and
Rodney Graham among its other major figures). Through teaching and
example, Wall has had a great influence over younger generations of the
city’s artist-photographers. Vancouver is the stage for most of Wall’s pho-
tographs, though the attraction is less its beauty and distinctiveness than
the way in which it is typical of smaller post-industrial cities which lie
beyond the major financial and cultural centres that compete with each
other globally.6 Wall depicts Vancouver, devoid of charismatic sights, as
a place of unexceptional urban and suburban vistas in which human
1
I would like to thank Malcolm Bull, Sara Knelman and William Wood, who offered
comments on a draft of this essay from which I have benefited greatly. I also gave
some of this material in lecture and seminar form to the Department of Art and
Art History, and the Humanities Center at Stanford University, and have benefited
from the conversations in both places.
2
The latter question was the subject of Douglas Crimp’s well-known analysis, On
the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, ma 1993.
3
Theodora Vischer and Heidi Naef, eds, Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné 1978–2004,
Basel and Göttingen 2005; Jeff Wall, Selected Essays and Interviews, New York 2007.
4
Respectively: Steve Edwards, ed., Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007: Jeff
Wall Special Issue [henceforth oaj]; Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iversen, eds,
‘Photography after Conceptual Art’, Art History, vol. 32, no. 5, December 2009;
Hans Belting, Looking Through Duchamp’s Door: Art and Perspective in the Work of
Duchamp. Sugimoto. Jeff Wall, Cologne 2009; Jean-François Chevrier, Jeff Wall, Paris
2006; Michael Newman, Jeff Wall: Works and Collected Writings, Barcelona 2007.
5
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven 2008.
6
‘Dirk Snauwaert: Written Interview with Jeff Wall’ (1996), in Selected Essays and
Interviews, p. 263.
stallabrass: Wall 95
figures are carefully disposed. He makes scenes which are often seen
as updates of Baudelaire’s vision of an art that would capture everyday
life, and while the concept of the ‘everyday’ has certainly shifted in Wall’s
work over the decades, he remains devoted to producing meticulous and
elaborate reconstructions of mundane scenes and incidents.
Wall is best known for his large lightbox transparencies, which are
photographic positives or slides encased in shallow metal cabinets,
backlit with fluorescent tubes. The technique of backlighting is com-
mon in advertising, particularly at bus stops, but is also a magnification
of the light-tables found in any professional photographic processor or
art history department. The contrast and chromatic vibrancy of the slide
greatly exceed those of any print, and Wall’s big pictures have long been
among the most immediately impressive weapons in the museum’s
photographic arsenal: these huge, illusionistic photographs of appar-
ently everyday contemporary scenes are highly readable, in the sense
that their every element is clearly identifiable, and their combination
suggests a narrative. Wall rejects the idea that the lightboxes are in and
of themselves critical objects pitched against advertising. Rather, he says,
they are ‘a supreme way of making a dramatic photographic image’.7 He
was among the first artists in the new wave of museum photographers
to realize the spectacular potential of the massive enlargement. Unlike
the photojournalists from whose work he draws, Wall uses large format
cameras to make big pictures that will withstand close examination. As
with academic history or mythological painting, viewers shuttle between
standing back to take in the whole scene and moving forward to inspect
detail. Even now, when such large-scale photography has become a
museum standard, Wall’s work offers a distinct combination of world-
view, style, technical prowess and manufactured object.
In Wall’s most ambitious and complex works, such as A Sudden Gust of

Wind (after Hokusai) of 1993, the image is assembled from numerous
photographic elements, digitally montaged, much as a nineteenth-
century history painting would have been brought together from many
individual figure studies. (Indeed, Wall’s work appears to bear the traces
of that technique, showing a slightly awkward interrelation of figures
7
‘Representations, Suspicions, and Critical Transparency: An Interview with Jeff
Wall by T. J. Clark, Claude Gintz, Serge Guilbaut, and Anne Wagner’ (1989), in
Wall, Selected Essays, p. 222.
96 nlr 65
reminiscent of large-scale figure pieces by Ingres, for example.) While

art history is invoked in the title, composition, scale and the posing of
the figures, pieces such as Sudden Gust also have the look of movie stills,
or rather of the publicity shots taken on the sets of movies by profes-
sional photographers. The area of Vancouver in which Wall has his
studio became a major location for film and television shooting from
the 1980s, and he drew on the available local resources in making these
‘cinematographic photographs’. The lightboxes subtly illuminate their
viewers, and this, along with their size and their metal framing, elicits
comparisons with Minimalism, which also sought to give the viewer a
bodily experience of proximity to its carefully scaled objects. (This was
the basis of Fried’s famous critique of the movement, which he thought
played too directly and theatrically to the viewer, mugging for the camera,
as it were, and allowing no room for the absorbed, timeless condition he
thought necessary for true aesthetic appreciation.)8
‘Everyday’ scenes
Most commentators assume that Wall’s depictions of everyday life suc-

cessfully convey some social significance. Yet the exact meaning of his
combination of formal, technical and iconographic elements is highly
elusive, and has arguably become more so as Wall has developed the
variety of his work through a series of highly considered contrasts. In
one sense, Wall’s subject matter is of a piece with the standard territory
of museum photography: in reaction against the kitschy and suspect
power of the snapshot that seizes some dramatic (or worse, decisive)
moment, everyday scenes, in which incident is downplayed or absent,
are elevated through enlargement to apparently epic significance.
Photographs by Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, to take two of the
most prominent examples, visually dramatize the quotidian, finding (in
a considered and conservative paradox) a charismatic visual expression
for Weberian disenchantment. The size and expense of these works are
far from incidental to their social use. What the museum demanded
of photography has been comparable to what it demanded of video—
inflation in size and insertion into installation, both pitched against the
television screen and the experience of mass media generally, seeking
to assure viewers that what art works offer is unlike anything merely
reproduced. This is often accompanied by a pompous tendency to insist
8
Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum, June 1967, pp. 12–23.
on its own profundity (a key example here being the work of and litera-
ture about Bill Viola).
To make such monumental photographs without the image becoming

noticeably grainy, artists use plate cameras, large boxes which must be
supported with a tripod. Large negatives require long focal-length lenses
which in turn require small apertures to deliver much depth of focus.
Only rarely can such cameras be used to freeze movement, and only
when the photographer steps well back from a subject is the whole scene
likely to be in focus. As Wall put it in one of his first texts, ‘by their
unwieldiness and fixity, [these cameras] impose rigid terms on what can
be successfully posed in front of them.’9 They are well suited to giving
a compelling, apparently comprehensive view of the mundane, taken
from a distance that is both physical and emotional. Yet Wall’s distinc-
tive move was to overcome those restrictions: his first solution to the
problem was to pose figures before plate cameras, as in an advertising
or fashion studio, simulating action. A second, in more recent digital
pictures, has been to take a number of photographs of the same scene
at different focus points, and then combine them to produce (say, in
a technically challenging forest scene) a depth of focus that would be
impossible with analogue means.
These techniques allowed Wall to focus on incident, albeit of a staged

kind, and that incident was admitted to the museum because, unlike
the uncomfortable interplay of contingency and deliberation in photo-
journalism and documentary photography, it was entirely in the control
of the artist. In Wall’s works of the 1980s, the posed figures interacted
with one another in ways that suggested social tension and even conflict,
and class, racial and gender concerns: a male foreman shouts at a female
garment worker (Outburst, 1989); two impoverished-looking women,
one carrying a child, walk across a piece of neglected land, the one appar-
ently complaining to or berating the other (Diatribe, 1985); a white man
pulls at his eyelid as he passes an East Asian on a Vancouver sidewalk
(Mimic, 1982); two white cops hold and search a Latino youth who stares
out of the picture with a melancholy gaze (The Arrest, 1989). In more
recent work, of the kind most favoured by Fried, incident is played down,
the figures are more often solitary, absorbed in some mundane task, and
while their place in the social hierarchy is sometimes made clear (maid,
9
Wall, ‘To the Spectator’, 1979, reprinted in Vischer and Naef, Wall, p. 438.
98 nlr 65
cleaner, migrant worker, draughtsman), the pictures are less about social
tension than about the character of their labour.
This combination of epic scale and staged incident is only the most
obvious of the distinctive features of Wall’s work. Another is its rela-
tion to painting in his exploration of pictorial genre, and to making
manifestly artificial, often strained, reworkings of traditional pictures
in photography. While the works that made Wall’s reputation are appar-
ently mundane scenes of everyday life, they are posed in such a way
as to evoke early modernist painting, the usual reference points being
Courbet and Manet. The awkward posing of the figures and their strange
gestures, along with the odd articulation of space, could be thought to
refer to the crisis in pictorial representation brought about by modern-
ism, and to be a recreation of it for another time and in another medium.
There was a point at which Wall was prepared to say that Baudelaire
and Manet still had resonance for contemporary society because of the
persistence of capitalism itself.10 As in Manet, the viewer is induced to
expect that the picture will offer a narrative meaning, when it is in fact
indecipherable, and the visible aspects of social alienation are rendered
through the way figures occupy a space in relation to one another, and
through their play of glances, expressions and gestures, and the details
of their clothing and deportment.
Another oddity is the character of Wall’s photographic manipulations.

It is not that other museum photographers who made large prints from
the 1980s onwards did not engage in considerable alteration of their
images—in fact it was the usual practice. Richard Avedon, another of the
pioneers of massive enlargement, engaged in highly elaborate tonal vari-
ation of his prints to make a heightened, stagey version of documentary
style. Other art photographers who made early experiments with digital
technology did so to highlight the viewer’s awareness of the strangeness
of these techniques, making morphed combinations of images (Nancy
Burson), manifestly collaged hybrid beings (Margi Geerlinks), and using
exaggerating pixellation (Michael Ensdorf). Wall, in contrast, used it to
stitch photographs together to produce unified, naturalistic scenes that
disavowed the technologies that had made them. While photographers
had made illusionistic analogue montages from the earliest days of the
medium (in the landscape work of Gustave Le Gray, for example, or the
10
‘Representations, Suspicions, and Critical Transparency’, p. 208.
complex figure scenes of Oscar Gustav Rejlander), it was highly unusual

for an artist to use digital techniques for that purpose in the 1980s and
1990s. It was also odd in the light of Wall’s earlier commitment to an art
that should reveal its own means. In 1984 he had written of the threat
photography had once posed to painting:
Photography reveals its own technical presence within the concept of the
picture, and so it reveals the historically new meaning of the mechanized
interior of the great spiritual art of painting itself.11
This was seen as a salutary demystification, so it is all the more strange

that when Wall adopted the new techniques in 1991, they were bent to the
service of a more effective and invisible emulation of the ‘spiritual’ art.
Then there is Wall’s insistent warfare against photography’s mechanical

reproduction, a common, indeed standard, artistic technique here carried
to an extreme.12 Many of the major lightbox works are made as unique
pieces, and the others are made in very small editions, rarely more than
two or three. While other major museum photographers make limited
editions of their largest works, Wall’s are more limited still.13 This restric-
tion of supply may be to insist on the object (as opposed to the image)
status of the works. It has an effect on the way the work is viewed, particu-
larly for those art-world types who travel extensively, since their relation
to the work will be similar to that which they have to a painting: it can
only be seen in one place at a time. Wall has also produced relatively
little work (the Catalogue Raisonné lists 120 works over 26 years). Once
more, this is not untypical of some museum photographers who produce
a small number of meticulously worked-on images, though again Wall
is an outlier. It is, however, far from being the only commercially viable
model, as the highly prolix careers of figures such as Nobuyoshi Araki
and Wolfgang Tillmans show. A result of the combination of Wall’s prom-
inence, low output and low edition sizes is that his work has become very
expensive: the dealer price for a large piece being about $1m.14
11
Wall, ‘Unity and Fragmentation in Manet’ (1984), in Selected Essays, p. 78.
12
For a remarkable account of the consequences of this restriction of mechanical
reproduction, see Eric Hobsbawm, Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the
Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes, London 1998.
13
Andreas Gursky for example makes even the largest versions of his works in edi-
tions of between four and six; Thomas Struth typically ten; Cindy Sherman in her
more recent, larger-scale work between six and ten.
14
See Arthur Lubow, ‘The Luminist’, New York Times Magazine, 25 February 2007.
100 nlr 65
In the 1970s Wall identified with the left, and he continued to do so

through the first decades of his commercial success. Even in the 1980s,
at a time when the tacitly McCarthyite turn of that decade was purg-
ing ‘political’ art from the museums and galleries, he remained both
marketable and apparently radical. Indeed, he can be seen as part of
a distinguished generation of leftist photographer-theorists, which
included Victor Burgin, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula and Jo Spence, who
also worked as educators, and whose writings transformed the theory
and history of photography. While Wall’s writing never had the impact
of those peers, he did teach in Vancouver universities for many years,
and some of his highly sophisticated essays on photography circulated
among cognoscenti. Yet, while Sekula’s and Rosler’s radical art has
gained renewed currency on the Biennial circuit, in the wake of the rise
of the anti-capitalist movements and the war on terror, Wall has adopted
a more conservative political position. Though it may once have been
possible to read his earlier work, with its fragmentary construction of a
naturalistic scene, as a model of Lukácsian aesthetics, Wall and most of
his recent interpreters now seem to distance themselves from his earlier
radical associations. As the artist put it in 2005:
I don’t like the idea of having extra-aesthetic interest in my subjects, as if I

am interested in them socially. When I began, I was under the illusion that
I did have those interests. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, amid the counter-
culture and the New Left, and I still believe a lot of those things, but they
don’t really apply to my work. I once thought they applied to my work, but
learned that they don’t.15
William Wood, who has published much work analysing the Vancouver
art scene, argues that even in the 1980s, the relation that Wall and his
associates (including Rodney Graham and Ken Lum) had to avant-garde
negativity was a historical and elegiac one, lacking an attacking or activ-
ist outlook. There were, at that time, a variety of radical alternatives on
offer in Vancouver—including the establishment of artist-run spaces,
feminist practices, work on the history of the First Nations, activist video
and experimental film. Wall and his associates preferred a mordant and
melancholic pessimism, derived from Critical Theory, that dwelled on
political defeat.16 Wall’s brilliant and insightful analysis of Conceptual
Art (written as neoliberal reaction began to take hold), which laid out the
Craig Burnett, Jeff Wall, London 2005, p. 30.

15
William Wood, ‘The Insufficiency of the World’, in Dieter Roelstraete and Scott
16
Watson, eds, Intertidal: Vancouver Art and Artists, Antwerp 2005, pp. 71, 64–5.
necessary incompleteness of its critique of the business and the institu-

tions of art, and saw it as a movement forged by the defeat of the left and
the narrowing means remaining to radicalism, may also be read as a
description of his own position.17
Entrance requirements
So, as a first sketch of the interaction of these particularities, it may be

that Wall’s radicalism was excused because of other conservative and
spectacular elements of his practice, and that its elegiac and historical
character was in any case unthreatening. Museums wishing to broaden
the social composition of their audiences were attracted to easily legible,
large-scale photography that dealt with familiar contemporary social
issues. While many left-leaning photographer-artists made relatively
cheap, easily reproducible and distributable work, and disregarded tra-
ditional artistic skills in favour of educative and dialogic virtues, Wall’s
work always aspired to the museum, rather than the classroom. While
the lightboxes were made using advanced technology, they were also
comfortingly traditional in their insistent references to art history, picked
up in the relation of the figures, their gestures, the lighting, and quite
often specific reference to renowned painting of the past. This is Wall
writing of the ‘Western Picture’ before modernism—of Raphael, Dürer,
Bellini and other masters:
It is known as a product of a gift, high skill, deep emotion and crafty plan-
ning. It plays with the notion of the spontaneous, the unanticipated. The
master picture-maker prepares everything in advance, yet trusts that all the
planning in the world will lead only to something fresh, mobile, light, and
fascinating.18
Put with Wall’s habitual eloquence, this clearly strikes a chord as

a description of his own ambition, as well as of the virtues of the old
masters too hastily jettisoned in modernism and conceptualism. It
was these qualities of familiarity, and above all the apparent assurance
in Wall of high seriousness, intense and lengthy labour and the firm
belief in quality, that helped position the artist at the head of the wave
of museum photography.
17
Wall, ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’ (1982), in Newman, Wall, pp. 265–98, espe-
cially pp. 271–2.
18
Jeff Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual
Art’ (1995), in Selected Essays, p. 144.
102 nlr 65
It was ironic, if unsurprising, that the charge to bring photography to the

museum (via the contemporary art gallery and the Kunsthalle) was led
by imitating painting, which had been the failed tactic of the Pictorialists
at the end of the nineteenth century. As Walter Benjamin put it, the
theoreticians of photography ‘undertook nothing less than to legiti-
mize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of
overturning’.19 The Pictorialist photographers appealed to the tribunal
through the imitation of paint and print surfaces, and the meticulous
manipulation of each photograph to individualize it as a unique object,
and as an emanation of an artistic sensibility. Wall’s lightbox surfaces
are unexceptional, except for the high resolution that was to become a
cliché, indeed a marker, of museum photography, but the tribunal was
satisfied with the denigration of reproducibility in favour of the singular
object, and the presence of so many manifestly traditional elements. It is
now the standard practice for museum photographers to make frequent
and insistent reference to painting and art history, as a way to place their
mechanical products firmly within the ambit of high art.
This assurance was furthered by Wall’s use of digital montage. It allowed

detailed control over every element of the photographic scene, and broke
the ironclad association of photography with the recording of contin-
gency. As Wall put it, writing of his first digital picture, The Stumbling
Block (1991), digitization furthered a ‘visual poetry or prose poetry’ which
conflicts with the indexical aspect of photography.20 While very close read-
ings of paintings in terms of the artist’s intentions, and the interplay of a
depicted subject and the form of that depiction—the stock-in-trade of art
history, the in-house literature of the museum—would be nonsensical if
used to describe a snapshot, they can with some plausibility be applied
to a photography over which the artist has such great control. From
the point of view of the museum, this use of digital technology was an
entirely welcome development. The museum’s historic suspicion of the
photograph had rested on its reproducibility and mechanical character:
reproducibility had been dealt with by the traditional method of limiting
supply; now mechanism was banished in favour of the hand- (or at least
mouse- or digital pen-) worked picture, of which the viewer could never
be sure that any fragment was free of the exercise of artistic sensibility.
Better still, unlike the kitsch montages of the Victorian era, which too
19
Walter Benjamin, ‘Small History of Photography’ (1931), in Selected Writings.
Volume 2. 1927–1934, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 508.
20
Untitled text, 1992, reprinted in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 333.
closely emulated painting, the results still looked entirely photographic:

a new and hybrid medium had been born.
Medium and autonomy
It is over the question of medium that one of the controversies about

Wall’s reputation has been fought. To take the most prominent of
his critics, Rosalind Krauss argues that Wall, in his use of the light-
box, invented an artistic medium but never took it seriously, and that
to do so would have been difficult since it is so singular and lacks an
aesthetic history. In fact, it is so distinct a medium that it can only be
practised by one artist.21 Wall’s failure here consigns his reworkings of
old masters to the level of pastiche.22 Two assumptions underlie this
argument, and each may be held up to question: first, that an interroga-
tion of medium is necessary to artistic seriousness. This view has led
Krauss, and others of the October group, to adopt a hostile attitude to
large swathes of contemporary art (for instance, installation) because
the concept of medium-specificity, and a critical reflection on it, cannot
easily be applied to such work.23 Second, that the lightbox counts as a
medium, rather than merely being one way of displaying photographic
positives, which do have a history, going back to the invention of the
Autochrome at the beginning of the last century. In any case, the ques-
tion of the medium-specific qualities of photography is a complex one:
while autonomous modernist painting tended towards abstraction, the
attempts to produce an autonomous, medium-centred modernist photo-
graphy (through the efforts of the f64 group, for example) led through
an emphasis on sharp focus, great depth of focus and full tonal range
to a fuller description of subjects in the world and an undermining of
autonomy. It is unclear which photographic qualities are its essential
ones. Wall himself remarks that ‘photography’s unique properties are
contradictory’,24 and there are certainly features intrinsic to photography,
such as selective focus, converging verticals, lens flare and movement
21
Rosalind Krauss, ‘“. . . And Then Turn Away?” An Essay on James Coleman’,
October, 81 (Summer 1997), p. 8. In fact, other artists have used it, though it is true
that none are as identified with it as Wall.
22
Krauss, ‘“. . . And Then Turn Away?”’, p. 29.
23
See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the
Post-Medium Condition, London 1999.
24
‘Interview: Arielle Pelenc in Correspondence with Jeff Wall’, in Thierry de Duve,
Arielle Pelenc and Boris Groys, Jeff Wall, London 1996, p. 9. This is one of Phaidon’s
glossy productions.
104 nlr 65
blur, that are largely banished from contemporary fine art photography
through adherence to its remarkably strict, if unwritten, conventions.
Yet Krauss’s charge has some purchase because for much of his career,
Wall made photographs that emulated paintings, and this enslavement of
one medium to another may work to the detriment of both. For example,
Wall claims to be the inheritor of the crisis of the tableau, as exemplified in
the work of Manet, in which unity and fragmentation are held in produc-
tive tension, the former being an ideal which founders on the expression
of social alienation in the latter.25 However, as Stewart Martin argues, the
‘claim to Manet’s painting of modern life is precarious, even sophisti-
cal’, since Manet’s unconventional brushwork, disjointed compositions
and strange perspectives find no photographic equivalents in Wall, whose
works resemble instead the smooth pictorial surfaces of neo-classicism.26
In the transposition from one medium to another, the critical charge of
modernist painting, inhering in painterly techniques, is mislaid.
As if to respond to that charge, in his work since around 1990, Wall

has been concerned with exploring the history of photography along-
side that of painting (Michael Newman characterizes this as a shift in
Wall’s ‘presiding genius’ from Manet to Atget),27 making works that
have a documentary (or near-documentary) status, alongside large black-
and-white prints some of which play with the limits of perceptibility in
sepulchral tones (in a programmatic manner, these dark prints serve as a
contrast to the lightbox works in which all is illumined in full detail). The
use of black and white has also allowed a reflection on the conventions
of the documentary tradition in photography. Nevertheless, the effects
should not be overstated, and Wall’s recent work, including the mono-
chrome pictures, is still discussed very largely in terms of painting, as is
typical with museum photography, in which the history of photography
is regularly downplayed.28
Yet it is remarkable that in the lengthy disquisitions about medium in the

Wall literature, there is very little discussion of the effects of digitization.
25
Wall, ‘Unity and Fragmentation in Manet’ (1984), in Selected Essays, pp. 77–83.
26
Martin, ‘Wall’s Tableau Mort’, oaj, pp. 126–7.
27
Newman, Jeff Wall, p. 224.
28
See, for example, Craig Burnett, ‘Jeff Wall: Black and White Photographs 1996–
2007’, in White Cube, Jeff Wall: Black and White Photographs 1996–2007, London
2007, n.p., in which the works are related to Poussin and Cézanne.
Newman’s extended, detailed and sophisticated discussion of medium

in Wall barely mentions it.29 Hans Belting also bats away the issue, stat-
ing that Wall:
does not employ a new photographic technique, but instead ‘edits’ the motif
that seems to depict our everyday world in front of the camera, just as we
would edit images in Photoshop. That is why his principle did not change
when he began to use digital technology.30
The ‘seems’ here could bear more weight than it is given. Both writers
follow Wall’s lead in making light of digitization:
I think the process of deconstructing photography as a rhetoric has reached

a point of exhaustion. This line of inquiry did not succeed in providing an
alternative to our acceptance of a physical basis for the photographic image.
We haven’t progressed beyond where we were when the medium was new,
and we won’t.31
On this view, photographs are made by recording light reflecting from

surfaces, and that is all there is to it. Yet the labour that goes into the
construction of Wall’s major pieces should give us pause. Fried gives
a detailed account of the two-year process of making A View from an
Apartment (2004–05), a visually lush but apparently mundane scene of
two young women in a flat, one reading a magazine, the other walking
by an ironing board.32 This involved renting the place, hiring a model to
live there and furnish it, long shooting sessions and the digital combina-
tion of various elements, particularly the views through the windows to
the city of Vancouver at dusk. With The Flooded Grave (1998–2000, the
dates themselves are telling) a very complex and lengthy process pro-
duced an image both naturalistic and hallucinatory, in which the bottom
of a grave is seen as an undersea environment. Wall first combined the
background and foreground of the image from two graveyards, then built
a tank made from moulds of the dug-out grave to fill with sea creatures,
and then went through the very difficult task of digitally combining the
various elements so that the joins would not show.33 Wall suggests that
29
Newman, Jeff Wall, pp. 161–224.
30
Belting, Looking Through Duchamp’s Door, p. 176.
31
‘The Hole Truth: Jan Tumlir talks with Jeff Wall about The Flooded Grave’, in Rolf
Lauter, ed., Jeff Wall: Figures and Places: Selected Works from 1978–2000, Munich
2001, p. 154.
32
Fried, Why Photography Matters, pp. 56–7.
33
For a full account of this process, see ‘The Hole Truth’, pp. 150–7.
106 nlr 65
even so complex a picture remains indexical, since each element is an

act of photography, of light reflected onto film.34
Surely, here he underestimates his own inventiveness, and the extent to

which the ontological character of the medium has changed. In photo-
journalism, which Wall has often emulated, there is a large measure of
chance, and photographers have little control over the image; they can
make choices about where to place the camera, when to press the shut-
ter, how to use selective focus, and the focal length of the lens, but most
other factors remain beyond their powers of manipulation. This has been
the basis for some critics denying that photography can have full status
as an aesthetic medium, since it is very hard for the viewer to know what
was intended and what was incidental.35 Wall’s manipulations are so far-
reaching that the viewer is placed in the position of assuming that every
element of the scene has been worked on by the artist, either through the
selection and manipulation of the object to be photographed, or through
digital means. Contingency is not entirely abolished but intention sat-
urates every point of the image, just as it does in the photography of
advertising, commerce and the public-relations industries. While some
Photoshop tools merely simulate traditional darkroom techniques, others
make a wide variety of highly configurable and finely graded alterations
to the images, which include features such as sharpening and precise
colour control that were unknown in analogue technology.
The digital photograph must count, surely, as a new medium—and, if

the manipulations are made openly, it may be used to reflect on the rela-
tion of straight photography to contingency. Here, though, through their
concealment, we are faced with a state of half-photography, in which
each surface has been digitally brushed over and bent to the will of the
artist. And here, Krauss’s charge has real force, not only for Wall’s prac-
tice but also for the writings of his supporters, since in both the new
medium is denied and concealed.36
34
‘The Hole Truth’, p. 154.
35
One notorious statement of this position is Roger Scruton’s essay, ‘Photography
and Representation’, in The Aesthetic Understanding, London 1983.
36
In a recent lecture, Wall took the logical next step of denying the importance of
the photographic medium, seeing it as merely one of a range of depictive tech-
niques, alongside sculpture, painting and print-making, which stand opposed to
conceptual art and its progeny. Jeff Wall, Depiction, Object, Event: Hermes Lecture
2006, ’s-Hertogenbosch 2006.
Museum prose
In the new wave of Wall literature, and particularly in the grandeur and
deportment of the Catalogue Raisonné, a massive volume that meticu-
lously documents each work that has been admitted into the oeuvre,
various suspicions are raised: it is implied in the monumental length
and heavily garlanded prose of the publications that Wall is a great artist,
and even on some accounts the saviour of the Western pictorial tradition.
Authors strain to deliver an analogue in prose of the aesthetic experience
delivered by the photographs, with results both vague and glutinous:
pieces are variously described as ‘mysterious and lyrical’, or offering ‘a
kind of pictorial amplitude’ and producing ‘a kind of ravishing lumi-
nosity’; or as manifesting Bergsonian duration in which ‘cyclical, linear,
polar or abstract notions of time converge in synchrony’.37 In Fried’s
book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, analysis regularly
makes way for the mysticism of a timeless engagement with the autono-
mous picture. Of Wall’s photograph of a cleaner washing windows at
the reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s famous Barcelona Pavilion
(Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, 1999), and
the way in which Wall had staged and constructed the scene, Fried writes
that it is:
a composition of great pictorial and intellectual sophistication, one that

exploits the ‘magic’ of absorption to induce the viewer to accept as verisimi-
lar something that he or she ‘knows’ to be improbable at best.38
In an earlier published version of this essay, Fried omitted the quota-

tion marks around the word ‘magic’ but it is unclear what is salvaged
by their addition.39 The book concludes with a long analysis of Wall’s
reconstruction of a scene from Mishima’s tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility,
and with a conspicuous piece of Mishima-inspired God-bothering, again
centred on timelessness.40
A striking feature of this literature is the extraordinary domination

exerted by the artist’s own writings and interviews. Wall is certainly an
37
Fried, Why Photography Matters, p. 62; Briony Fer, ‘Night’, in oaj, pp. 80, 77;
Lauter, Jeff Wall, pp. 23–4.
38
Fried, Why Photography Matters, p. 75.
39
Fried, ‘Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein and the Everyday’, Critical Inquiry, no. 33, Spring
2007, p. 517.
40
108 nlr 65
intelligent commentator on his own work and that of others, but the
status of the writings between artist’s statement and academic analysis,
and the shifts between the two, can be difficult to tie down. Some very
sharp analysis of art-historical developments sits alongside passages of a
poetic and even mystical character:
I also like dirty sinks, the soggy abandoned clothes I see in the alley behind
my studio all the time, crusted pools of dried liquid and all the other pictur-
esque things so akin to the spirit of photography.41
In his earlier writings, Wall cultivates an ingenious, playful bringing

together of opposites, in a dialectical or paradoxical conjunction which
yields sharply and beautifully expressed phrases, part analysis, part artis-
tic performance. For example, the glass office towers of Mies van der
Rohe and Philip Johnson express ‘with cold irony and detachment what
the city has in fact become: a bad view’. Or: ‘the architectural project of
the glass house reveals in pure form its historical fate: to live by virtue
of its own death.’42
Wall’s writing is also haunted by a variety of ghosts, once Critical Theory

spectres that summoned and lamented lost political ideals, now art-
historical shades that flit in and out of consciousness seeking beauty:
There is always something spectral—ghostly—in the generic, since any

new version or variant has in it all the past variants, somehow. This quality
is a sort of resonance, or shimmering feeling, which to me is an essential
aspect of beauty and aesthetic pleasure.43
The Catalogue Raisonné reprints many of Wall’s texts, both lengthy

essays and many shorter texts on individual works which complement
the catalogue entries. In a number of elaborate framings of the history
of avant-gardism, modernism, conceptualism and the history of pho-
tography, Wall provides a thorough contextualization of his oeuvre that
is naturally referred to insistently by critics and historians, and rarely
escaped.44 He has also given many interviews about his own works. The
41
Wall, ‘A Note about Cleaning’, (2000), in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 393.
42
Wall, ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’, pp. 55, 65.
43
‘Interview: Arielle Pelenc in Correspondence with Jeff Wall’, p. 14.
44
These essays include ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’, ‘Unity and Fragmentation
in Manet’, ‘Roy Arden: An Artist and His Models’ and ‘“Marks of Indifference”:
Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’, all of which may be found in
Selected Writings.
dominance of that literature is seen in the extent to which it is reprinted

in monographs, and the regularity with which it is cited by other writers.
The manner of those citations is also remarkable for, despite the very
marked shifts in Wall’s positions over the years, his statements are rarely
held up to critical examination but are rather taken as incontrovertible
evidence for the interpretation of his pictures. Fried, to take one exam-
ple, cites Wall frequently and reverently, and since Wall has long had an
interest in Fried’s writing, even gets to cite Wall citing Fried.45
Adrian Rifkin, in a critical essay on Wall, writes of the effect, referring

to the Phaidon monograph on the artist, edited by Thierry de Duve and
others, which also reproduces much of Wall’s writing:
Wall’s own speaking appropriates and fully processes everything that
touches it with the effect that the relation of the practices of making and
theorizing, in the work and around it, make for a monumental closure of
which openness, question or uncontrolled readings are nothing more than
one of the characteristics of its monumentality. In none too subtle a loop
the critical itself emerges as the highest and shared form of value, the com-
modity offered by the book, and figured in a mutual hollowing out of art
and critical discourse.46
In the Catalogue Raisonné, texts by Wall are described as ‘primary’, while

those by other authors are secondary. While the question of what counts
as a primary text in the study of contemporary art is a delicate one, the
designation here has a sense: it allows us clearly to see Wall’s oeuvre as
being a unit of text and picture, each dependent on the other.
The artist writes
We can briefly map the interrelation of work and prose through various
moments in Wall’s career to point up the changes. The earliest writ-
ings, two lengthy essays on the work of Dan Graham written in 1981
and 1982, were heavily influenced by Adorno, especially as applied to
the visual arts through the writings of Benjamin Buchloh.47 Here, a pro-
found sense of cultural pessimism, defeatism, irony and detachment is
lightly leavened by holding out the possibility that artistic models which
45
46
Adrian Rifkin, ‘What is a Minor Artist? A First and Last Note on Jeff Wall at Tate
Modern’, available at www.gai-savoir.net.
47
Wall, ‘A Draft for “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel”’ (1981); ‘Dan Graham’s
Kammerspiel’, both in Selected Writings, pp. 11–75.
110 nlr 65
juxtapose elements normally forbidden may still hold a critical charge.

Similarly in Wall’s 1984 essay on Manet, the idea that absolute fragmen-
tation had become the standard aesthetic in contemporary photography
offered up the possibility of a productive, anti-orthodox bringing of frag-
mentation and unity into contention.48 These writings correspond with
the evolution of Wall’s distinctive style and subject matter, in a series of
works made between 1982 and 1985, mostly street scenes such as No
(1983), in which a wealthy looking man walks past a prostitute at night,
or Milk (1984), in which a young man—possibly indigent—squats on a
pavement before a new brick building while milk from a carton he holds
spurts into the air.
While Baudelaire’s hymn of praise to Constantin Guys for his meticulous,

immersive, selfless and innocent depictions of modern life emphasized
the ‘splendour and majesty’ of ‘the river of life’, Wall’s version is a good
deal gloomier.49 Working-class decline and defeat may be read into these
images, which were made as neoliberal economics began its terrible
unfolding. Mimic, for example, as Walter Benn Michaels points out,
is not merely a reconstruction of a casual racist gesture, but should be
set within the context of the wave of immigration to Canada from the
1960s onwards of well-educated Asians, who drove the existing working
class to further economic disadvantage.50 Abundance (1985) sees two eld-
erly women gathering cast-off clothes from a box marked ‘Free’, one of
whom regards the camera in a self-aware fashion, displaying the many
layers of clothes she has donned as an absurd sign of her need. To render
such subjects in this cool, epic form speaks of an ironic detachment.
The Thinker (1986), Wall’s first work to contain elements of fantasy, is
an explicit reworking of Dürer’s proposed monument to the defeat of
the Peasants’ Revolt.51 The figure, a man in a suit and work boots, sits
on a stump and pieces of concrete, overlooking a rail yard, the wheat
silo of a long-established co-operative, and in the distance the towers of
Vancouver. The man is of an age that, had he lost his job, he would be
unlikely to find work except of the most unskilled, casualized and low-
paid kind. As in Dürer’s print, a sword protrudes from his back. Close
above his head, the picture is divided by the heavy black of telephone
48
Wall, ‘Unity and Fragmentation in Manet’.
49
Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, London 1984, p. 11.
50
Walter Benn Michaels, ‘The Politics of a Good Picture: Race, Class, and Form in
Jeff Wall’s Mimic’, pmla, vol. 125, no. 1, 2010, pp. 178–9.
51
Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 302.
© 2010 Jeff Wall

Milk, 1984. Transparency in lightbox, 187 x 229 cm
lines, the data-carriers which spelt the end of effective, nationally based
working-class power. Wall was certainly concerned to describe this situ-
ation, but nothing in these pictures points to resistance. The spilling of
milk may indicate the pointlessness of shedding tears.
In two essays of 1988, on Rodney Graham and Stephan Balkenhol, Wall

steps back from Adornian pessimism, saying first that some aspects
of postwar fragmentation in art, such as Arte Povera, offered ‘vistas of
possibility and hope’, and further that there were opportunities in the
renunciation of an experimental form that had ‘congealed into ortho-
doxy’, and the utopian embrace of representation, particularly of the
human figure.52 Ernst Bloch is the model here, and while Wall still writes
about capitalism, there is less focus on class—indeed, with relation to
ecological depredation, he uses the terms ‘us’ and ‘we’. This shift is
‘Into the Forest: Two Sketches for Studies of Rodney Graham’s Work’ (1988); ‘An
52
Outline of a Context for Stephan Balkenhol’s Work’ (1988), in Wall, Selected Essays,
pp. 87–101, 103–7. Quotations from pp. 103, 105.
112 nlr 65
accompanied in 1988–89 by works in which there are more overt depic-

tions of oppression and conflict—sexual, racial and class-based. There
are images of eviction, a couple’s estrangement, the berating of a worker
by a foreman in a garment factory, teasing and perhaps bullying children,
and arrest. Yet while this period marks the high point of Wall’s depiction
of social conflict, the oppressed (when they can be identified) remain
passive and powerless, and the utopian a merely formal possibility.
In his brief 1989 essay, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, first pub-
lished in a major group exhibition in which Wall’s work was shown
alongside that of Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas
Struth and others, the artist laid out a contrast between the wet and dry
aspects of photography. The dry was associated with optics, geometry,
ballistics, certainty and precision; the wet with archaic, pre-industrial
work, the chaotic and the unpredictable; the combination of the two
in photography achieving ‘a historical self-reflection, a memory of the
path it has traversed to its present’.53 Tarkovsky’s film Solaris is also
invoked to suggest that liquid chaos (or intelligence) has its own pur-
poses and agency, which may be far from ours. The enthusiasm for
chaos theory and science fiction fits, perhaps, with the trend at the time
for some on the left to comfort themselves with remote utopian possi-
bilities and the thought that those in power could not foretell or control
the consequences of their actions. Once again, it suggests a distant,
even Olympian, view.
In 1992 and 1993, Wall made massive, heavily manipulated and mon-
taged pieces. Some were overtly fantastic, such as Dead Troops Talk (A
Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan,
Winter 1986) (1992), an elaborate scene of a ‘conversation’ among recently
slaughtered Soviet troops. Others were plausible, though plainly only
realizable through montage, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind; and others
use extensive manipulation to render quiet and naturalistic scenes, as in
Restoration (1993). In 1993 Wall also wrote an essay about the work of
Vancouver artist-photographer Roy Arden. Here, the main claim is that
photojournalism contains a dialectical structure comprising the pros-
aic and the poetic, which is also a tension between the instant and the
implied narrative of the event depicted.54 Art photographers, however, do
not merely practice photojournalism or any other standard photographic
53
Wall, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, Selected Essays, pp. 109–10.
54
Wall, ‘Roy Arden: An Artist and His Models’ (1993), in Selected Essays, pp. 115–17.
genre, but rather emulate it and reflect on it.55 Arden’s strictly composed
works of the 1980s:
hover just at the point of resembling autonomous works of pictorial art.

They reflect both the moment at which photojournalism becomes art, and
the last one in which it remains lyric, miniature and utilitarian—that is, in
which it remains reportage.56
Again, this plainly reflects back on to Wall’s own aims: Dead Troops Talk is a
highly self-conscious infusion of a photojournalistic subject with fantasy
and, of course, academic figure composition. In A Sudden Gust of Wind,
a mundane if photojournalistic subject—a meeting between business-
men and labourers on a farm—is apparently transformed momentarily
into a scene that evokes the past and art history by the weather (a cha-
otic system) scattering the instrumental—business documents—high
into the sky.
In Restoration, women engage in the slow and painstaking work of

restoring Edouard Castres’s Bourbaki Panorama in Lucerne, showing the
crossing into Switzerland of a portion of the fleeing French army in 1871.
Wall’s massive panoramic photograph is a celebration of their labour,
and is the first of many elaborate works in which the artist takes as his
subject such often overlooked tasks. Indeed, Wall sees the women acting
as a conceptual model of how society should be:
I think one of the historical roles of pictorial art was to make images which
in a way are models of behaviour, too. First, they are conceptual models
of what a picture should be, because every picture can be thought of as a
proposal of a model of what a valid picture is. But, also, the behaviour of
the figures in the picture may be models, or at least proposals of models, of
social behaviour, of whatever kind.57
There is plainly a parallel between Wall’s own meticulous labour in stag-

ing, photographing and digitally montaging, and that of the restorers.
Further, Wall is happy to say here that Restoration has a post-revolutionary
55
This claim also is made in a later Wall essay, in which he argues that Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Brassaï were making art by imitating photojour-
nalism; this is a key claim for Wall, who cannot accept that reportage can be art,
but would have come as news to all of them. See ‘“Marks of Indifference”’, Selected
Essays, p. 145.
56
Wall, ‘“Marks of Indifference”’, Selected Essays, p. 120.
57
‘Jeff Wall in Conversation with Martin Schwander’ (1993), in Selected Essays,
p. 234.
114 nlr 65
and even counterrevolutionary implication, in which the old regime is

preserved and even brought back to life. This revival is certainly one
of an old pictorial tradition, but, as we shall see later, it is increasingly
accompanied by other conservative attachments.
Wall’s production of sustained writing about art, both his own and other
people’s, has slackened, and the rate at which he produces pictures has
increased, as he branched out into making black-and-white prints and
smaller lightboxes. While he still gives many interviews, there are many
subjects on which he prefers to hold his silence. It is telling that the last
interview in the volume of his selected writings ends with Wall saying: ‘I
am not so concerned to comment on interpretations of my work, or any-
one’s, these days.’58 He hardly needs to, since he has found such effective
mouthpieces in those art historians who have written at length about his
work, and whose writing remains dominated by Wall’s own views.
Hunting sources
For those who take the side of Wall, he is one of the most important art-
ists of his generation, or even of his epoch. Michael Newman, among the
most effusive of the artist’s supporters, writes:
We can think of the Duchamp of both The Large Glass and Etant donnés as
not so much breaking with the pictorial tradition as, in a rather perverse
and fetishistic way, preserving it so that the Western tableau could be reani-
mated for its uncanny afterlife in Wall’s backlit Cibachrome transparencies,
and carried over into the large-scale directorial photographs of a generation
of artists inspired by Wall’s example.59
This view of Duchamp, which echoes Wall’s own, is a very eccentric

one, for it sees him as a saviour rather than a destroyer of artistic tra-
dition.60 While such a view would have seemed incredible at the time
when Duchamp gained renewed importance for the contemporary art
world in the late 1950s, as traditional art forms came under sustained
assault, it does acquire a ‘perverse’ plausibility when conceptualism and
58
‘Post-60s’ Photography and its Modernist Context: A Conversation between Jeff
Wall and John Roberts’ (2006), in Wall, Selected Essays, p. 345.
59
Michael Newman, ‘Towards the Reinvigoration of the “Western Tableau”: Some
Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp’, oaj, p. 100.
60
For Wall’s later view of Duchamp as a part of ‘great pictorial culture’, see ‘Interview
between Jeff Wall and Jean-François Chevrier’, in Selected Essays, p. 320.
spectacle have become fused in the grand conversation piece that is now
taken as art; after all, some of its elements may happen to be pictorial or
traditional. While there is no unanimity among Wall’s admirers about
the legacy of Duchamp (and indeed for Fried he is the figure who led
art to dwell between rather than within media, and as a consequence,
abolished quality and value), there is agreement about Wall’s status.61
Fried explicitly argues that it is museum photography that has renewed
the Western pictorial tradition that was once borne in painting, and that
Wall was among the most important figures to have grasped that this
was photography’s proper task.62 To place Wall in that position is more
than to imply that, like Duchamp, he is not merely a great artist but one
who has brought about major and lasting artistic change.
A marked feature of this literature is the pains it takes in the identifica-

tion of sources and influences behind Wall’s pictures (in an attempt,
perhaps, to identify the components of that ‘shimmering feeling’). Wall
has certainly referred to paintings in his works with explicit rework-
ings of Delacroix, Hokusai and Manet. In some art-historical writing,
the analysis of sources and close visual reading are given a particular
point through their bearing on ideological, political or other issues.
Steve Edwards, for example, in his account of A Donkey in Blackpool
(1999), which Wall had made to be paired with one of Stubbs’s most
celebrated horse paintings, Whistlejacket, makes clear the class asso-
ciations of each, their situation in very different worlds of leisure, the
Christian allusions in the subject of the donkey, and uses this analysis
to suggest that the picture may be read (once again) as a monument to
the defeated working class.63
More often, however, the identification of sources seems to be an exer-

cise in assuring that the works receive the right kind of attention as art,
imbuing them with historical depth, while demonstrating the author’s
perspicacity, knowledge and sensibility. So Newman, in discussing The
Destroyed Room, which is (as Wall tells us) a reflection on Delacroix’s
Death of Sardanapalus, also finds references to Duchamp (through illu-
mination and the staged mise-en-scène), Pompeian villas (in the wall
colour), Matisse, Courbet, Fontana and Barnett Newman.64 Thierry de
61
Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, Chicago 1998, pp. 44–5.
62
63
Edwards, ‘“Poor Ass!”’, oaj, pp. 39–54.
64
Newman, Jeff Wall, pp. 17, 21.
116 nlr 65
Duve, among others, picks out a figure in The Storyteller (1986) which
seems to resemble one in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and makes great if
vague play with its significance.65 It may be noted that Wall himself has
made a few statements expressing scepticism at such source-chasing.
He writes that the model in The Storyteller who appeared to echo the
figures in Manet’s work did so by accident, though ‘everyone picked up
on that’.66 Moreover, on his work Odradek (1994), which is based on a
story by Kafka, when asked if the girl coming down the stairs alludes
to Duchamp or Richter, Wall says that he does not ‘make those kind
of jokes’ and she is just a girl descending a staircase: ‘If people want to
think in those terms, then that’s their affair. Depiction just causes things
to resemble each other.’67
This is not to say that an artist’s statements should be held up against

those of a critic or historian, and that the latter be found wanting. It
is rather that the game of finding images that resemble other images
is likely to be both endless and useless (except as artistic validation)
without the discipline of a point that sits outside an art history which, at
its worst, emulates the supposed autonomy of the pictures. Artists, least
of all Wall, are hardly innocents in this, since, as we have seen, making
art-historical references is one of the most reliable tactics to get a work
discussed as if it is art. Within the context of the art world and the com-
petitive positions taken by artists, critics and historians, it is hard not to
see such references to sources as a form of social display, and as being
indelibly marked with the inequalities of class, education and the oppor-
tunity for cultured leisure.
The taint of mass culture
The interest in art-historical comparison has come to be matched by

a neglect and even denigration of mass culture, which plays down the
importance of what non-specialist viewers may experience when look-
ing at works by Wall, which are, after all, about ‘everyday life’. In part,
this hostility is to do with the widespread idea that art can offer an anti-
dote to a technological mass culture that provides quick, disposable fixes
of clichéd stories, off-the-peg emotions and standard forms. So video
art, in its flight from the fast cutting and mobile camera work of film
65
Thierry de Duve, ‘The Mainstream and the Crooked Path’, in de Duve et al, Jeff
Wall, pp. 46–7.
66
Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 39. 67
Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 77.
and television, is supposed to encourage a slower, more considered and

critical way of viewing moving images. Similar claims are made for large-
scale museum photography as against the photography that is rapidly
consumed in newspapers, magazines and advertisements. For some crit-
ics, one of Wall’s achievements is to hold the viewer before a medium that
is normally so quickly glanced over and gutted for a recognizable narra-
tive or emotive charge.68 Others posit an utter separation of mass culture
and the work of art, and place Wall entirely on the side of the latter.69
The shard of truth that these views contain lies in the structural neces-
sity of art photography to oppose the mass industry of image production,
just as high art in general must distinguish itself from mass culture.
Nevertheless, Wall’s own views on this issue have changed dramatically,
and he used to be happier to point to sources for his work in film, televi-
sion and even advertising and commercial display.70 The first lightbox,
The Destroyed Room, took Delacroix as a source, as we have seen, but
also indicated its commercial origins by reflecting on the artificiality
of the room ensembles made for shop-windows. This piece of ‘built
disorder’ was shown in a gallery window, facing the street, just like a
shop display.71 These days, however, the artist does not want viewers
to think about anything other than high art. In a reply to a question
about whether Dead Troops Talk may be related to television or newspa-
per imagery, Wall said:
Just because I made a war picture doesn’t mean that people automatically
or necessarily have to associate it with media imagery. That presumes that
media imagery is a total horizon of everyone’s experience. Those presump-
tions have now reached the stage of orthodoxy. That is an unfree way of
conceiving how individuals experience works of art, unfree and unrealistic.
Conformist, institutionalized, academic, textbook and suffocating.
Wall goes on to say that art is an independent experience of the world,

and that cultural studies and immersion in mass media threaten the
Western canon.72 It may be that the sources and references that are
useful to a young and unknown artist are quite different than for those
68
See Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 74.
69
See Hans Dickel, ‘Image Technology and the Pictorial Image: Media Images ver-
sus Art Images’, in Lauter, ed., Jeff Wall.
70
See Wall, ‘To the Spectator’, in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 438.
71
The phrase is Belting’s, Looking Through Duchamp’s Door, p. 150.
72
Gordon McDonald, ‘Interview: Jeff Wall’, Photoworks, Autumn–Winter 2005–06,
pp. 20, 23.
118 nlr 65
who stand at the apex of the museum world, but it may also be that, in
the exclusive focus on fine art, some of photography’s most interest-
ing associations and affiliations—particularly those to photojournalism,
commerce and film which Wall himself explored with acuity in his early
writings—become lost.
The prose written by Wall’s champions is destined for the museum, just
as the photographs are. It appears directly in museum catalogues, or
books from museum publishing houses, while the rest of the literature
bolsters curators’ various texts with ideas and authoritative quotes, and
influences the way works are hung and juxtaposed. In this way, theme,
object, display, interpretation in exhibition boards and leaflets, catalogue
and monograph texts, and the encouragement of appropriate reactions
in an audience are integral parts of the ‘work’, which is no mere col-
lection of objects but rather the construction of a social network that
includes collectors, curators, critics, art historians and (lastly) viewers.
The paradigm of such writing is the volume by Fried, Why Photography

Matters as Art as Never Before, which in its resolute focus on the pictorial
tradition and on what the author takes to be its fundamental charac-
teristics, its grandiose self-importance and even its design, is geared
towards an aesthetic validation of its subject. While there is a degree
of ontological musing about photography, and the claim is even made
that photography is ‘compelled’ to do ontological work, the character and
extent of its contribution remain unspecified.73 The fundamental purpose
of this prose is to assure the status of its object of study for the museum
and the canon. While Fried’s views do not remain entirely unchanged
from those of his youth, and he is obliged to acknowledge the ‘theatri-
cal’ aspects of Wall’s work, these are bent only to a further heightening
of absorption, of a parallel between subject and viewer, both sunk in the
timeless form of close attention, shut off from the clamour of the world,
and participating in an engagement with labour and aesthetic apprecia-
tion that remains comfortingly unchanged across the centuries.
The reader of this now complicated and very extensive literature will
come across a broiling stew of theoretical, political, art-historical and
cultural references of which Wall is the master. It may be that he learned
from his postgraduate study of Duchamp the value of creating art works
and discourse which together function as interpretative traps; which,
73
through the elaboration of considered contrasts—monochrome versus

colour, light versus dark, fantasy versus the everyday, landscape versus
still life, single versus multiple figure compositions, large versus small,
posing versus documentary, to take but a few—are capable of generating
endless circles of reference and self-reference.74 Wall’s own writing, in
places a model of close reading, gives a clue as to the results. In explor-
ing the elements that make up a work by Dan Graham, the Alteration
project, Wall enters into long and brilliant analyses of the use of glass in
architecture, the modernist glass house, the office block, the tract house,
suburbia and urbanism generally—just under thirty pages devoted to a
scrupulous unpacking of cultural meaning.75 This, to get at only three
elements brought into novel juxtaposition in Graham’s project: glass,
mirror and tract house. Since what is examined here is not merely each
element taken singly but their relations with each other, the complexi-
ties of such analysis must increase exponentially as further elements are
added. It is easy to see that Wall’s work admits of no terminable analysis
in this form.
Art history and art criticism are the willing victims of the interpretative
trap, not least because of the institutional requirement for the continual
generation of texts to act as buttresses for work in the contemporary art
industry and for state-enforced bean-counting assessments of research
‘outputs’. Multiple readings, indeterminacy, and a revulsion at ‘essen-
tialism’ are the touchstones of this discourse, which exudes the heady
perfume of postmodern mysticism. They are also supposed to have
a close affinity to what art offers as a consoling supplement to mass
culture and working life. Wall’s work now comfortably inhabits the
centre of this orthodoxy. It is no surprise to read in the introduction
to the Catalogue Raisonné, in a text surely endorsed by the artist, that
all his pictures ‘have no moral pretensions and do not communicate
a fixed meaning, but rather emphasize the instability and contingency
of their meaning’.76
Is it possible, then, to cut through this Gordian knot of sources,

theories and references? In much of the recent Wall literature, taken as
74
See Duchamp’s writings on his ‘Large Glass’: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s
Green Box, London 1960.
75
Wall, ‘Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel’, pp. 31–75.
76
Theodora Visher, ‘Introduction’, in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné, p. 10.
120 nlr 65
a whole, there can be found the symptomatic characteristics of much

contemporary art writing: ‘poetry’, publicity and indeterminacy; the anti-
dotes may be materialism, neutrality and politics.
‘Objecthood’
To begin with the material, among the first and most obvious points
to make about the lightboxes is that they are large, expensively manu-
factured objects, necessary to the development of Wall’s evolution of a
signature style as an exceptional, individualistic artist, and that they are
used to control and restrict the display of Wall’s images. In the early
years, Wall was clear that the very expense of making these transpar-
encies (along with that of the cinematically staged shoot itself) was an
advantage: they represented his commitment to art, attracted serious
attention, and the money to ensure his future artistic career.77 The rar-
ity of such objects increases the distances and frequency with which
they need to be shipped. The art world has barely begun to confront its
extraordinary environmental profligacy, which has been exacerbated as
it has become increasingly globalized and event-based, as the flocks of
private jets track the global tour of biennials and art fairs, while rare and
heavy art objects are transported by air, accompanied by couriers. It is a
particularly perverse situation when there is a good argument for saying
that the ‘work’ is not any particular lightbox (which could be replaced if
damaged or destroyed; some indeed have been after undergoing irrepa-
rable degradation due to the materials used in their construction), but
rather the digital file from which the picture is made—and this could be
sent anywhere that has an Internet connection, with very little expense or
environmental impact. Instead, the control of the image, to preserve its
market value and to keep its display in the hands of the experts, trumps
all other considerations.
As for neutrality, the point is not necessarily to be for or against such pic-
tures, certainly not in terms of their place in an aesthetic canon. Rather,
we may, neutrally, examine their effects. Wall’s lightbox works are big,
detailed, brightly coloured things, entertaining to look at, as convincing
a simulacrum as any fashion or advertising shot; they may get us to
think about other art; they may get us to think about politics or society.
Their utility for the museum—as providing a form of spectacle that has
77
Wall, ‘To the Spectator’, in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisoné, pp. 437–8.
to be seen as a physical object in a physical space to get the full effect,

and as a generator of art-historical discourse—is obvious. Wall’s legacy
is clear in the proliferation of large, complex figure pieces staged for
museum walls, tableaux vivants for the contemporary age. Some of his
most successful followers point up the dubious elements of Wall’s work,
hidden by his relative tact. The very expensively staged, manipulated and
mannered scenes of Gregory Crewdson hint at dark goings-on in the
suburbs. Their cheesy and schlocky air is reminiscent of David Lynch
but also develops the contrast between the mundane and the fantastic
found in Wall. David LaChapelle, a highly successful magazine portrait-
ist who has moved into art photography, uses digital procedures to make
complex and highly polished allegorical figure scenes in which easily
recognizable art-historical references are blended with celebrity images
and pop culture in gaudy abandon. Wall’s warnings about the pollution
of the pictorial tradition with mass culture have their nightmare incar-
nation here, while the inhuman sheen of LaChapelle’s flesh and the
too-perfect cleanliness of his objects make apparent what is hidden in
Wall: the hybrid medium that is the digitally painted photograph.
Turning to politics: just over ten years ago, John Roberts thought it plau-
sible to argue that realism for Wall was less a matter of narrow aesthetics
than the recognition of a historical connection between representation
and the possibility of a public culture for art, so that to defend a painting
of modern life was to hold onto the ideal of a non-bourgeois audience for
art.78 More recently, Michael Newman has argued that there has been a
shift in Wall from work in which beauty was seen as a promise, and the
basis for a critique of the present, including unjust social relations, to his
current rejection of the utopian. He goes on to cite Wall:
The Utopian aggression against the actual, against the slow and the
imperfect—I see that as a rhetoric, as one of the last formations of the
avant-garde. Democracy involves imperfection. The fundamental aesthetic
trait of democratic culture is the taste for imperfection. It has to do with
accepting its presence and of knowing that everything you do won’t be
realized exactly as you want it to be, and that other people will also have
something to say about it.79
78
John Roberts, The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday,
Manchester 1998, p. 187.
79
Philip Ursprung, Jacques Herzog, Jeff Wall and Cristina Bechtler, Pictures of
Architecture/ Architecture of Pictures: A Conversation Between Jacques Herzog and Jeff
Wall, New York 2004, p. 67; cited in Newman, Jeff Wall, p. 13.
122 nlr 65
This is but one of Wall’s recent statements about the role art may play in
an ‘imperfect democracy’:
One of the great processes carried on in modern democratic society is that

in which people learn to come to terms with imperfection in themselves
and others. So I think the commonplace has an enormous charge on an
artistic level because it ruins the old hierarchies of art and lets new feelings
emerge. I think by working with that, it is possible to create a new feeling
of the beautiful—one that is refreshed.80
Ugliness is associated with evil in the Western tradition, as Wall himself

points out, and so by implication beauty with virtue, here with mundane
daily activities, often those that imply care for a person or an object—
in particular, cleaning. It is a concentration on the overlooked tasks of
improvement and maintenance in a conservative art that tries to bring to
expression the striving for modest improvement, and to give it beautiful
form and coherence. This can be seen most clearly in the ambitious and
complex montage Morning Cleaning. Fried and others have subjected this
picture to some very abstruse readings,81 but it may be seen as a depic-
tion on a grand and extraordinarily labour-intensive scale of a disregarded
act which is nonetheless central to the ideal effect of Mies’s luxurious
modernism, which a little dirt would certainly ruin. The cleaner, as Wall
produces him in the picture, is absorbed in his task as we viewers should
be in Wall’s spectacular image. He is entirely, if not happily, lost in the
elimination of suds from glass, and may be compared to those depictions
of farm workers in eighteenth-century England, defined by their fixed
place in the natural hierarchical order.82 The frame of a modern monu-
ment takes the place of landscape here, but the message is similar—of
virtuous labour, ordinary but necessary, that plays its part in the mainte-
nance of the ‘imperfect order of democracy’. Art lovers, who like to think
of themselves as complex creatures, may view it as a pastoral scene, in
their sophisticated and elite appreciation of simple virtues.
The point of reference for Wall in these remarks on democracy is no

longer Critical Theory but Walt Whitman in his essay ‘Democratic Vistas’,
80
Wall cited in Burnett, Jeff Wall, p. 89.
81
Fried, Why Photography Matters, pp. 66–82. For an equally complex counter-
reading, see Christine Conley, ‘Morning Cleaning: Jeff Wall and The Large Glass’,
Art History, vol. 32, no. 5, December 2009, pp. 996–1015.
82
For a view of Richard Wilson’s landscape work that followed these lines of argu-
ment and at the time produced a furious controversy, see David Solkin, Richard
Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, London 1982.
and Diderot’s remarks on the imperfectible nature of humanity. The

awkward, stilted figure poses and relations that still characterize Wall’s
work, and which used to be related to critical modernism, alienation and
forced social relations, are now bent to register democratic imperfection.
Wall remarks that ‘this imperfection implies gentleness and forgiveness,
and the artistic challenge is to express that without sentimentality’.83
The change may be registered through Wall’s extraordinary urge to

remake some of his early works, in particular Eviction Struggle (1988),
which has been digitally recast using the original working shots under
the new title An Eviction (2004). The lightboxes were already held in
collections so the owners had to agree to the replacement of their old
works for new. In the later version, Wall made extensive changes to the
placing of figures and cars, and lessened the photograph’s tonal contrast.
Most significantly, and in line with the change of title, Wall removes
two figures who do not merely glance at the scene but watch steadily
from a distance, and who may be read as officials or landlords oversee-
ing the eviction.84 So we move from a piece that was a long landscape
view of class conflict, to one that may more easily be read as a meditation
on human imperfection, in which power relations are toned down and
‘struggle’ is lost.
The tension between an apparently radical description of the social

consequences of neoliberalism and the spectacularly commodified char-
acter of Wall’s work has evaporated. In its place, we see a celebration
of what the artist takes to be democratic life as it is lived. A clear exam-
ple is Dressing Poultry (2007), which shows women workers preparing
slaughtered chickens to be eaten. One turns to the camera, laughing
as if enjoying a joke, and despite the mundane clutter of the shed and
the bloodied labour, the scene is almost a cheery one. Whitman recom-
mends variety and freedom as the founding principles of his vision of
democracy, and ‘the full play of human nature to expand itself in num-
berless and even conflicting directions’.85 It is a fair description, too, of
the old ideal of the artist, the ungrounded bourgeois hero, free of mate-
rial and cultural constraints, and of the work that results. When the life
of this democracy appears on the lightboxes, it is not hard to read such
pictures as an advertisement for what exists.
83
‘Arielle Pelenc in Correspondence with Jeff Wall’, p. 21.
84
I am indebted to William Wood for this point.
85
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas, London 1912, p. 301.
124 nlr 65
Wall’s thoughts about democracy do, though, raise questions about the
possibilities for a democratic culture. Are they to be found in the exclu-
sive, specialized culture of the few, pitched against mass culture and
the mass media, that Wall recommends, one which is made by a few
great artists who sustain a great tradition?86 Are they to be achieved
through rare and vastly expensive objects made by individualistic art-
ists in signature styles? Do we need such geniuses to interpret the
world visually, curators to control the way their products are seen, and
the weight of those art-historical volumes that tell us how to see? Or
would a democratic culture rather be collective, participatory, dialogic,
less fixed on the singular object and on institutions governed by the
wealthy? Would it be faster moving, freely copiable and alterable, and
also perhaps ephemeral?
In 1989, in some very interesting remarks about the simplistic reduc-

tion of all representation to complicity with capitalism, Wall argued that
such views are most likely to be held in capital cities where people are
not only consumers of images but also tend to work in or close to huge
image-production industries. In that realm, images seem to float free of
context, referent and nature to become ‘totally moveable properties’ gov-
erned by the business cycle.87 In the years since, the distinction between
producers and consumers of images has been eroded, above all for pho-
tography and video, as almost every mobile phone has a camera built in,
and as digital technology has provided the means not merely to make
images but to publish them. Many more people not only take photo-
graphs but manipulate and upload them to public sites (this is the ‘us’
referred to above, a broad group that cuts across class divides, though
still a small minority of the world’s population).
The reality of a democratic image culture is hardly to be found in the

broadcast model of the museum, with its policed and expert discourse,
strictly guarded by copyright, but with all its imperfections in the post-
ings of images and the dialogue they elicit on YouTube and Flickr. If that
discourse is thought shallow or even vacuous, conventional, commercial,
epigrammatic to a fault, even perhaps idiotic, it offers a clearer look into
the face of our ‘actually existing democracy’ than the photo-paintings
of Wall and those who have followed in his path. In both realms, word
86
See McDonald, ‘Interview: Jeff Wall’, pp. 20, 23.
87
‘Representations, Suspicions, and Critical Transparency’, p. 209.
and image-making is constrained—in the museum by direct control,

on the web by the frame and structure of the interface—and in both,
the ideal of democratic freedom seems distant, for that would require
the bringing together of complexity and accessibility, singular expres-
sion and cooperation, and power and mass participation. Perhaps,
after all, the two realms might best be seen, in terms borrowed from
Adorno, as ‘torn halves of an integral freedom—to which, however, they
do not add up.’88
88
Letter to Walter Benjamin of 18 March 1936, in Adorno, Benjamin et al, Aesthetics
and Politics, London and New York 1977, p. 123.

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226 Stallabrass Museum Photography and Museum Prose

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julian stallabrass

AND MUSEUM PROSE

Wall, born in 1946, is one of the most prominent photographic artists

new left review 65 sept oct 2010 93

special issue of Art History about ‘Photography after Conceptual Art’,

Wall is unusual, among major artists, both in having academic training

In Wall’s most ambitious and complex works, such as A Sudden Gust of

reminiscent of large-scale ﬁgure pieces by Ingres, for example.) While

Most commentators assume that Wall’s depictions of everyday life suc-

To make such monumental photographs without the image becoming

These techniques allowed Wall to focus on incident, albeit of a staged

Another oddity is the character of Wall’s photographic manipulations.

complex ﬁgure scenes of Oscar Gustav Rejlander), it was highly unusual

This was seen as a salutary demystiﬁcation, so it is all the more strange

Then there is Wall’s insistent warfare against photography’s mechanical

In the 1970s Wall identiﬁed with the left, and he continued to do so

I don’t like the idea of having extra-aesthetic interest in my subjects, as if I

Craig Burnett, Jeff Wall, London 2005, p. 30.

necessary incompleteness of its critique of the business and the institu-

So, as a ﬁrst sketch of the interaction of these particularities, it may be

Put with Wall’s habitual eloquence, this clearly strikes a chord as

It was ironic, if unsurprising, that the charge to bring photography to the

This assurance was furthered by Wall’s use of digital montage. It allowed

closely emulated painting, the results still looked entirely photographic:

Medium and autonomy

It is over the question of medium that one of the controversies about

As if to respond to that charge, in his work since around 1990, Wall

Yet it is remarkable that in the lengthy disquisitions about medium in the

Newman’s extended, detailed and sophisticated discussion of medium

I think the process of deconstructing photography as a rhetoric has reached

On this view, photographs are made by recording light reﬂecting from

even so complex a picture remains indexical, since each element is an

Surely, here he underestimates his own inventiveness, and the extent to

The digital photograph must count, surely, as a new medium—and, if

a composition of great pictorial and intellectual sophistication, one that

In an earlier published version of this essay, Fried omitted the quota-

A striking feature of this literature is the extraordinary domination

In his earlier writings, Wall cultivates an ingenious, playful bringing

Wall’s writing is also haunted by a variety of ghosts, once Critical Theory

There is always something spectral—ghostly—in the generic, since any

The Catalogue Raisonné reprints many of Wall’s texts, both lengthy

dominance of that literature is seen in the extent to which it is reprinted

Adrian Rifkin, in a critical essay on Wall, writes of the effect, referring

In the Catalogue Raisonné, texts by Wall are described as ‘primary’, while

The artist writes

juxtapose elements normally forbidden may still hold a critical charge.

While Baudelaire’s hymn of praise to Constantin Guys for his meticulous,

© 2010 Jeff Wall

In two essays of 1988, on Rodney Graham and Stephan Balkenhol, Wall

accompanied in 1988–89 by works in which there are more overt depic-

hover just at the point of resembling autonomous works of pictorial art.

In Restoration, women engage in the slow and painstaking work of

There is plainly a parallel between Wall’s own meticulous labour in stag-

and even counterrevolutionary implication, in which the old regime is

This view of Duchamp, which echoes Wall’s own, is a very eccentric

A marked feature of this literature is the pains it takes in the identiﬁca-

More often, however, the identiﬁcation of sources seems to be an exer-

This is not to say that an artist’s statements should be held up against

The taint of mass culture

The interest in art-historical comparison has come to be matched by