Jeff Wall: Visionary or Lazy?

Several people have suggested to me that I study his work but frankly I’m not in the least bit interested. He is so far from being a street shooter that he is of little importance to me.

For me, definitely visionary, and no way lazy.. I don’t see his work as ‘ultimately fake’, it is only possibly that if you try to pretend
he is a street shooter, which he isn’t, nor does he pretend to be. I don’t think he sees himself as a photographer either, but as an artist with a camera.
(Uh oh..what’s the difference..answers on a Jeff Wall postcard to..)
I find his methods strangely fascinating, so far removed are they from how I, or most photographers work.
Hooray for diversity, that’s what I say. :)
Best,

New York Times article on Jeff Wall

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Wall.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Entertaining like a Hollywood movie…

I read the magazine article as well this morning…and have often enjoyed his work, rather….have thought it very clever and intriguing (the lightboxes are gorgeous in real life) and for someone who has a background in art, I thought the work was strong…as with most claims about artists from the last 20 years, i find much of the critiques and his own claims extraordinarily over-inflated and self-referential (but he’s a smart modernist all the way)…for me, the irony is that his images and photographs have grown increasingly predictable…like most of what we imagine, the truth (for me) about his work lay far removed from the ferocious accolades that the work has received in the last 20 years….a visionary (for me) no, a strong, intelligent and thoughtful artist, yes….a visionary rarely defines herself/himself by the language through which they’re muttering (postmodernism), but instead transcends that very language….i love Wall’s early work and I like alot of the images from the last 10 years,….i just find it ironic (as well as predictable/superficial), his obsession with permanance, (and being taken seriously permanently): to me, its the great irony that few have tackled with his work…..but he is absolutely not lazy……

clever, academic, literate and often remarkably beautiful…..but, for me, doesn’t speak but in the specificities of contemporary artistic jargon….

as for the Magazine: if that Sunday Mag isnt the most predictable mag on the flace of this planet (when it comes to artists), i dont what is…..

interesting reading…

b

That isn’t an artist, its a businessman pretending to be one…..

I don’t really see, what you are going at, Andy. Wall’s reputation is not built upon the integrity of street photographers. Sure, it is fake, but he never pretended that his photographs show real life. The work I remember always seemed very sureal to me. I have never thought of him as being a street photographer or him pretending to be one. And I don’t have a problem that, at the same time, he is obviously inspired by Winongrand and others.
His famous self portrait is strongly referencing Manet’s “Un bar aux Folies-Bergère”. Would you say he is lazy, because he took a photo instead of sitting in front of canvas for days? That is how art (and everything else) advances. People take up ideas of other people and use them in a different context. Sometimes they improve, sometimes not. Once in a blue moon, a genius comes along with an entirely new idea.
A bussiness man? Well maybe, but I am pretty sure that there are easier ways to make money.

His photos are like trying to invent life for the blinds.

Fake images inspire fake emotions (to me anyway), “real” photography allows you to touch at something great. I don’t have a problem with mickey mouse photography, it just doesn’t do it for me. if your a faker then i guess you just don’t get it.

,,,… got tired and boring…. just like my lazy fart…. nice idea though

in the end it is the observer who has to decide.

Edward, well said— if you are a faker than you just don’t get it. That is what I wanted to say, he just doesn’t get it……I want to connect with life, to grab it and understand it, to capture a moment and say here it is, look at it. I think thats what most of us “Lightstalkers” do. Its the same hunger that Winogrand, William Klein, and others less famous have had.

So Jeff Wall decides that this genre has run its course, as he states in the article, and it isn’t grand enough for the museums he aspires to be in, and he borrows the look of that form, commercializes it by stripping it from reality, sets up his photographs to appear to be candid (unless you are told that this is his method, who would know, in fact many of the museum goers have probably not a clue), and creates giant prints, that like billboard advertisements are memorable even for their magnitude. Its all very well thought out—too thought out, for my tastes, and as Imants says, ultimately boring, especially after one learns the “method.”

We can make pigs fly in the wind with a blue screen, does that make it “art.” Although I suppose Stefan is right, in the end its the observer that has to decide, and in many places that means if the image big, in a prestigious museum, about nothing, and has a high price tag, its has to be great.

I do love the quote “I didn’t want to spend my time running around trying to find an event that could be made into a picture that would be good.” His photo of day laborers on a street corner, according to the caption beneath his work, took two weeks and involved a cast of 20. Which he was paying to photograph. So he’s not lazy. Not exactly, anyways.

With him, I’m torn. I, more or less, like his work that CLEARLY doesn’t look documentary (ex. “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue”).

I dislike his work that looks documentary but is set up. Like the aforementioned day laborers photo. Jon Lowenstein’s day laborers work from years ago is far more affecting. For me, anyways. http://www2.soros.org/photogalleries/mw_gallery.php?series=/resources/events/mw7/lowenstein/&id=5

The set-up “docu-like” work is good if you like lip-synching. It’s okay if you like Milli Vanilli or Ashlee Simpson’s respective oevures…but their work isn’t entirely honest. Neither is Wall’s.

To me, anyways. It is considered “art” afterall and I don’t want to get into the aesthetic/semantic argument that goes with the question of “What is…art?”

I think there are too many BS artists in the art world.

""…I want to connect with life, to grab it and understand it, to capture a moment and say here it is, look at it.""

right Andy, so I would say he is creating something artificial. it doesn’t sound so hard then “fake”.

Thanks Andy for this thread. For my two cents worth, see the blog

jeff wall is alright.works hard,follows his vision,gets his work out there.as to his photo-journalism based pieces?personally i feel like are fairly weak because he does not really change anything.he takes street photographty and recreates it,but he does not add anything to the mix.i am not really keen on his interpretation of ralph ellison either,because he is too literal.metaphors exist to provoke the imagination,the intelligence.slavishly recreating them is a bit pointless.

as always Michael succinctly put.

i personally think wall is dead…. as is the (re)evaluation of the structure of meaning and process…. nonetheless it still sells in the art world.. still floats in circles still harping on po what? post-never happened…. anyhow im not personally interested in work that is not self-conscious of the medium and the process (although wall does not quite pull it together for my liking)….anyhow i think wall is dead as is his meta argument…….oddly, perhaps, i think (photo) journalism as a ‘canon’ could benefit much from the ideas floating around modern/post(not)modern art… i personally think shit is pretty much at a stand still……. (rebirth???) (ps.. all these ideas are much better articulate in alfredo jaar’s work, interviews, writings etc….(in my opinion)…… re: intersection of pomo and pj’ing……)

Is Wall any different from Gursky (just smaller)? The NYTimes article is about the connection between Wall and painting, not street photography or journalism.

It’s all part of some weird visual language I guess I don’t understand. I guess it’s the contrived + meaningless combo I can’t quite seem to appreciate.

Wall is “an artist” who recreates situations at his convenience. He doesn’t claim to be a photo journalist or a street photographer. Cindy Sherman, La Chapelle, Annie Leibowitz, to name a few, are other photographers who create settings. You either like it or you don’t. Even portraits taken by either from HCB or Diane Arbus is posed to a small degree… The point seems moot. Caravaggio hired thieves, murders and prostitutes to pose for his paintings, Da Vinci and Michaelangelo sketched interesting characters for their paintings. I gathered that Wall sets up the shot with hired models and sets and photographs it… It seems like an awful lot of work to be so “lazy”. I. would. rather. walk. around. and. keep. my. eyes. open…

Jeff Wall is an artist who uses a camera. why get upset about that. he does not claim to be a photojournalist. its like getting mad at a fiction writer for not being a journalist. Sometimes literature does a better job at telling the truth that journalism, sometimes not. Why pick on Jeff Wall ?? there are thousands of photographers who are NOT journalists.What nobody on Lightstalkers has ever done an advertising job?…That is dishonest! But it pays the bills for some of us and some of us are no good at it and wish we were.

If you don’t like jeff wall, well that is a personal choice and a legitimate one. But if photography is something sacred, why not get angry at all the photojournalists when they do advertising, PR or commercial work?? does that not constitute chasing the dollar on the back of photojournalistic integrity?. I doubt few of us would turn down a lucrative job that paid well.

As the journalism busines suffers, a lot of us are going to have to make some tough choices about wether we want to continue being photographers outside the diminishing editorial world. Let’s hope we all are as succesful as Jeff Wall.

At least when I look at a Gregory Crewdson I may not understand, feel, or even care, but I can sense his photographic position…so to speak. With Wall I’m just confused as to his intent. The images are just too boring and mute no matter what his academic explanation might be

if anyone is interested in the work of photographers mining a similiar vein,check out tom hunter.he poses his shots,he alludes to both painting,news and literature,yet for me his work is much more interesting,more real,wittier and more intelligent.no direct link,google him.

Aparently “history of photography” is strange for most of the people on this post… and i ‘m not talking about photojournalism… i’m talking about PHOTOGRAPHY!

Quite frankly.

Mustafah: 100% with what you said, but I wonder if is it worth to try to explain it to this people…

Cheers,

Armando

does it get personal now? is it not possible to leave people their personal opinions?

all the anger about Wall is really interesting and Im not sure I understand it either….nothing more for me to add that others havent added already…..photography is like cooking or breathing or listening or fucking: it means many things to many people for many reasons and is accomplished through many means, though in the end, the goal (no matter the orientation) is the same: images born of light (real or imagined) as some means of language….that many PJ’s attack the work for its lack of versmilitude is as annonying as artists attacking PJ’s/Documentarians for their lack of theory/ideas…..it all seems pretty silly, on both sides….for me, Wall’s not the visionary claimed by a large spawn of the art world nor is his work as unimportant or unemotional as others claim….this hierarchy of judgment is always humourous: he’s a smart, creative, interesting artist, whose work is sometimes breathtaking and sometimes pedestrian and superficially didactic, and shit, can’t the same be said of all of our own work anyway? ;)))))

as for Hunter that Michael mentioned, here’s the only like I know, his gallery reps…

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/tom_hunter.htm

more hunter:

http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/tomhunter/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A7771160

It is not a question of geting personal and yes everyone is entiteld to their own opinions.

But this tipe of discussion is extremily limited, for what i consider inteligent, informed people.

With apollogies to whoever might felt necessary.

Armando

No responses to Jon’s blog?

Andy: i read Jon’s blog…..it’s a thoughtful (though, also, academic reading: another irony, sits implicit in Jon’s analysis is that his own critique of Wall’s postmodermistic approach is in fact driven by his own postmodern sensibility) analysis, but I think it is always (a priori) a mistake to critique a work vis-a-vis diametric opposition. While the comparisons between Richards, Towell and his own photos as contrapuntal images to the Wall photos, is clever and funny, I’m not sure they serve to bolster the argument (which seems to be at the heart of the argument) that Wall’s images are less emotional, less truthful, less deserving of “discovery” or a multiplicity of viewings/reactions. Just as Wall’s assertion that most photographs are not worthy or do not inculcate the desire to look at the image multiples times (the most fucking assinine comment in the NY Mag’s interview, and one of the quotes which nearly eviscerated all respect I have for Wall), the pairing of the images does not “prove” that the street images are more worthy. All the images are interesting and enact in each of us a different response. the truth is, i am sorry to say, that ALL PHOTOGRAPHS are a lie: we pre-construct everything, including PJ, street photogs, candid family shots, all. A photograph is NOT real: is a palimpest of moment that, through the mechanical process of a box aligned with the our human desire/ideas/senses, creates something that appears to have happened, but in fact did not. Though I respect Jon and I cherish the intelligence, thoughtfulness and erudition to which he always tackles his analysis, I’m afraid its a bit of the same bogey. Discover, as Jon points, out, lay at the heart of our tale-telling, shape-shifting, disappearing lives. However, those epiphanies come for different reasons at different times and for many many different reasons. I too have worked both sides of this photographic coin and found both equally surprising: thinking of shooting selfportraits and tooling away at images and re-visiting them (can i please refer everyone to Robert Frank’s “Storylines” to see about discovery as an alphabet of many languages)……that Wall’s images, for me as well, in the end do not stay with me as profoundly or as viscerally as other photographers does not vitiate their strength or interest. Listen, I hear “artists” all the time using gnomic essays to cut down the work of PJ/Documentarians/Street/Family photos all the time, and I find the same behavior idiotic……I think jon’s essay, honestly, fails to bridge the fundamental problem: we havent been talking about “photography” (or lens-based imagery) but instead have lingered over different mechanism and outlooks and affective/intellectual reactions….that wall doesnt resonate as profoundly for me does not mean that his image ‘Milk’ is any less vital than Richards’ is just as opaque as Wall suggesting that Winogrand, Arbus, Frank et all had ghettozied themselves…both are arrogant and solipsistic positions. If Walls taxedermy is solipsistic, so too the world of PJ’s running around believing that THEIR photos of OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES are less so…..

in the end is ridiculous: that we spend so much time arguing that our measures are correct: as I said: a keen abacus of our own stupid-ass blindness, all of us…..

b

let me just clarify: i do NOT think Jon is blind or solipsistic!!! ;))))))))))))))))))))))))….i understand that people (including myself) who shoot “real people in real time” feel the breath and blood of life and I think that is often why people and work like Walls is often maligned, just as the art world often maligns those who work outside of the prism of contemporary gallery-fuck-fests…..I was trying to suggest that it is impossible (not matter how clever or erudite jon is, and he’s a damn clever cowboy! :)) to refute something when the denial of it is also self-refuting….Hegelian ;)))….

let it live, and let us invest more properly in our work, regardless of what the artworld may construe ;))))

and thanks jon for butting up with my dandruff ;))))

cheers,
bob

Sleepless in St Domingo. well I am chuffed that the blog gets such thoughtful reactions, which I guess is why I do it. I certainly hope that the piece doesnt come off as a small minded attack on Wall, and I tried hard to give him his due, which I honestly believe is due him; I didnt set out to prove anything exactly either, but to delineate two tradtions (one consistent with the Art World hegemony and one on the outs) and through a comparison of motifs I found in particular photos suggest that perhaps the spontanteity of the street esthetic, which involves an engagement with the object world that is very different from that embodied by artists like Wall, leads to imagery that is ultimately more satisfying for its greater range of meaning and narrative complexity. Perhaps its just personal prejudice, but ultimately i find the products of Art photography to be a bit thesis ridden and stifling.

There is one thing I think we should clarify, however, and that is the idea that all photographs are lies, we pre-construct everything, and the representation we create is something that appeared to have happened but didnt. Clearly this is not true: photographs are used to verify and record events all the time — my own father’s whole neuropathological practice depended heavily on the use of photography for verfication and study of phenomena, and until critics come to grasp the heady paradox of this odd medium (its power for reproduction and its contrary fictive impulse) we will get nowhere in the discussion. It is precisely the knee jerk belief that a photo is a lie which stymies our ability to see that it is really something quite more complex and interesting. (Fontcuberta’s dictum, bear in mind, was intended as an ethical warning.) Take a look at the Richards photo I put on the blog: that is a record of an event. It really happened and was witnessed. Yes we see that event from Richards’ perspective as he rose up out of the subway and snapped it from his particular vantage point, and that imposes a particular point of view on the scene; but the girl is throwing the water, the people really were seated in those positions, and to argue otherwise is just pure sophistry. The image is not a lie, nor is it entirely “preconstructed”. That image embodies a subtle relation between two sets of controls: the photographer has his particular camera and settings and vantage point and the power to decide when to snap; but the object world too has its control and imposes its unique character born of that moment on the final image. The photographer cannot wholly impose his will, he is not the sole creator in the mix, and that engagement with the object world in which one is forced to cede control and in the process perhaps be graced with an image is precisely what makes the street esthetic the more interesting genre for me. Put it this way, Wall is Photographer-as-Painter: he works with total control over the medium just like any other painter or traditional visual artist, but what distinguishes photography is its ability to engage with the flux of life as no other visual medium before it because the technology of the small mobile camera puts the shooter in an entirely different relation to “reality.” This allows for the spark of accident or contingency to enter the picture. It is this tradition and this esthetic that the blog I write is pretty much focused on, unlike say, Coelberg’s Conscientious, where one is more likely to find articles on photographers like Wall.

Btw, I am a bit of a solipsist, and that is probably why I work the way I do; if I worked like Wall I would go insane.

Armando, I would like to understand why you think that the discussion is “extremely limited”, which are your thoughts?

regards Stefan

There have always been pictorialists,, going right back to when a photograph was exposed over minutes. Scenes were constructed with an eye to the environment the photographer saw around him. My instinctive reaction to these images, in the knowledge of how they were taken, is to appreciate them. While he is inspired by what he see around him, he is creating a still life of sorts. Some of the images don’t move me and some are quite beautiful. I think his quote is rather tongue in cheek. Much work and preparation goes into something like this. I also like what this guy does http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1 Amazing pictures…

Hi stefan:

It s not the first time that i seee discussions like this one by “pure photojournalists”.

And as I read somewhere up in this post with don t fashion photographers get so
“worried” about issues like this one?

I would like to believe that photojournalists are more inteligent than this… After all we are talking about photography, that goes much further than just photojournalism.

Photography is not just used to inform (in a journalistic sense) is most of all used to communicate.

And let me tell you that the work by Jeff Wall is not one of my favourites, but i do recognise and understand his purpose and can see it s place in the big picture that is the contemporary photography scene. As well as Thomas Gursky, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, Miguel Rio Branco and all this photographers/artist that fall out off the photojournalism sphere… And how about Stephen Shore???

What do you think about it?!

Cheers,

Armando

Armando and Mustafah, just for the record, my own take on this has nothing to do wiith pure photojournalism and the blog piece I wrote is really about the relative merit of two schools, street and let’s say “studio”, and why one should dominate so much the art world while the other languishes, when it too has so much to offer. It is true you cant get mad at a fiction writer for not being a journalist, but that wasnt my particular point. Abrazos.

I still don’t understand what some are accusing Wall of faking.

Either you get a kick out of spending weeks discoloring cement in your studio set up or you get a kick out of spending weeks on a sidewalk out in a neighborhood. Different processes, different results. I imagine most people on LS get their kicks out of being on the sidewalk out in a neighborhood. Is Wall’s work threatening that? Rather than a threat, it seems to me like a conversation. There was an analogy made to getting mad at the fiction writer for not being a journalist. They are not interchangeable rolls, but they do inform each other.

Comon …… Wall’s work is like watching the Lion King sixty three times to the music of Latvian tap dancers!!!

Hello Armando, from time to time I like Andreas Gursky, also Jeff Wall, I like a lot Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Bechers work is just boring to me. I also understand this sentence “””…I want to connect with life, to grab it and understand it, to capture a moment and say here it is, look at it.”“” and others written above, … even if they come from ““pure photojournalists””, it is their opinion…

like I said before, “fake” maybe sounds hard, I prefer “artificial”.. artificial world, Jon Vink said: “Entertaining like a Hollywood movie…”
so everybody has his own opinion, I respect it.

regards Stefan

Well put Stefan, “artificial” is a better word…..I have reached a better understanding of Jeff Wall through this discussion, and my conclusion is that his work may be derivative (isn’t all of our work somewhat derivative?) but he is clearly not lazy and untalented, certainly not a fake at all. But I don’t mind saying a few provocative things to fuel a discussion which is healthy all around.