Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
It is astonishing to remember that important art-photographs could be purchased for under $100 not only in 1950 but in 1960.
The essential model, for me, is still the painter, the artisan who has all the tools and materials they need right at hand, and who knows how to make the object he or she is making from start to finish. With photography this is almost possible.
I’ve always felt that good art has to reflect somehow on its own process of coming to be.
Every picture-constructing advantage accumulated over centuries is given up to the jittery flow of events as they unfold. The rectangle of the viewfinder and the speed of the shutter, photography’s “window of equipment,” is all that remains of the great craft-complex of composition.
What an artist could do with photography wasn’t bounded by the documentary impulse—but that other part was underdeveloped. Painting could be topographical realism or it could be angels—in the same medium. Why couldn’t photography do the same thing?
The still picture is the most free visual form, it invites the most free experience. Since it shows only an isolated moment, it cannot and must not show other moments, it can only suggest them. We take the suggestion, and elaborate it ourselves, freely, or very freely, according to who each viewer is, or wishes to be.
I’m struck by things I’ve seen, but I don’t photograph them. If they persist in my mind, I try to recreate them.
Photography could emerge socially as art only at the moment when its aesthetic presuppositions seemed to be undergoing a withering radical critique, a critique apparently aimed at foreclosing any further aestheticization of “artification” of the medium. Photoconceptualism led the way toward the complete acceptance of photography as art—autonomous, bourgeois, collectible art—by virtue of insisting that this medium might be privileged to the negation of that whole idea.
