Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]
A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.
Meaning does not interest me and has almost nothing to do with my decisions or judgments.
I begin by not photographing.
Because image traffic has become so heavy and so continuous, it now seems as if these millions of images came into being by themselves, without the agency of a person.
I guess you could say I’m like a film director but my movies have only one frame.
One paradox I have found is that, the more you use computers in picture-making, the more “hand-made” the picture becomes. Oddly, then, digital technology is leading, in my work at least, toward a greater reliance on handmaking because the assembly and montage of the various parts of the picture is done very carefully by hand.
The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that.
If you are capable of making good pictures it’s immoral not to do so, for whatever reason or excuse you might give.