Jeff Wall

Biography

Wall traces the idea for his main format to a bus journey between Spain and London: at the stops he saw advertisements lit from within. He had just been to the Prado, and two things came together: old painting on a large scale and the glow of street signs.

He was born on 29 September 1946 in Vancouver. At the University of British Columbia he studied art history; in 1970 he received his master’s degree there, with a thesis titled “Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context”. While still a student he had tried conceptual art, making monochrome paintings and collages of text and photographs. That same year he stopped making art. He moved with his family to London and from 1970 to 1973 did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he studied with the art historian Timothy James Clark. He then taught: in 1974–75 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, from 1976 to 1987 at Simon Fraser University, and then at the University of British Columbia, where he was a full professor until 1999. He wrote essays on contemporary artists, among them Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Roy Arden, Ken Lum and On Kawara, and he placed his own early work within the circle of his Vancouver colleagues.

He returned to photography in 1977 and made his first back-lit photographic transparencies. His first exhibition, at the Nova Gallery in Vancouver in 1978, he presented as an installation rather than a photography show: he put “The Destroyed Room” in the shop window and enclosed it in a plasterboard wall.

“Picture for Women” (1979) is a reworking of Édouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”, which Wall had seen as a student at the Courtauld. He took the painting’s internal structure: the mirror behind the bar, the light bulbs that give depth, the woman’s gaze. In the frame are the artist himself and a woman, while the camera stands at the centre and is caught in the mirror’s reflection. It is a transparency on a lightbox, about 142 × 204 cm. “Mimic” (1982) looks like a chance snapshot: on a street in an industrial suburb a white couple overtake an Asian man, and the young man makes a gesture mocking the shape of the man’s eyes. But the scene was recreated from an incident the artist had witnessed himself. The transparency measures 198 × 226 cm.

In the 1990s Wall began joining separate negatives into a single frame by digital montage. For “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)” (1993), which moved a Japanese woodblock print to British Columbia, he worked for more than a year and made about a hundred photographs. Since 1995 he has also made black-and-white silver gelatin prints; examples were shown at documenta X. “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue” (1999–2000) reproduces the narrator’s cellar from the novel, with its 1,369 light bulbs.

Susan Sontag ended her last book, “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), with a discussion of his “Dead Troops Talk” (1992), an invented scene after an ambush of a Soviet patrol in Afghanistan in the winter of 1986. In 2003 this work, shown as part of the exhibition “Moscow–Berlin”, was not allowed into the State Historical Museum in Moscow, where the Russian part of the project was held.

Retrospectives of Wall’s work were held at Schaulager in Basel and Tate Modern (2005), at MoMA in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago (2007), in San Francisco, Mexico City and Vancouver (2008), and in Dresden (2010). In 2011, for an exhibition in Brussels, he chose about 130 works by artists he admires, from Eugène Atget to film excerpts, and showed 25 of his own beside them. His awards include the Hasselblad Award (2002), Officer of the Order of Canada (2007) and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2008). To my mind, his influence is clearest among the Düsseldorf photographers: Andreas Gursky called Wall “a great model for me”.