Exercise - Jeff Wall in Pluk Magazine

JEFF WALL - HOLE IN THE WALL 


http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/pluk_JeffWall.pdf

Jeff Wall pictures can be seen here....


A View From an Apartment  2004

This is the newest of 50 works in the long awaited Jeff Wall Retrospective at the Tate Modern.  In the picture above two young women occupy the cluttered but orderly modern interior dominated by the
imposing Vancouver docks outside their apartment window.  Impossibly real, the photograph is the result of a laborious process of intricate fakery whereby the docks are as sharply defined as the upholstery.  By merging seamlessly more than 100 individual still life images taken during the course of several weeks, both at the apartment and on a purpose built set, the camera effectively imitates the hi res  immediacy of human sight.

The cinematographic technique described as 'near-documentary'has made his photographs influential, although Wall insists that cinematography is just a way of practicing photography ( 30% of my pictures are straight photographs ). The snapshots that many of thee pictures resemble are in fact a collection of momentary details reassembled long after the event.  Rather than the pursuit of authenticity, traditionally the poetic principle of photo journalism, it is the authenticating eye of the audience that Wall is, at times
playful with.  The photographs meaning comes from how we look for that which is absent.

Walls photography has come to occupy the uncertain in between space of the storytellers.
'Writing is something to experience' Wall says 'and my pictures are made from my experience.'

Seeing Walls pictures in the flesh its hard not to notice an otherwise undetectable seam that runs through the middle of many of the transparencies, suggesting that two prints had been sown together in order to achieve the grand master piece.  He now has a printer large enough to avoid the 'seams'..
Walls abiding preoccupation with the fabricated nature of his images and ultimately his ambitions to both foreground such artifice whilst simultaneuosly masking it.