Steidlville

For over 20 years, Jeff Wall has been developing an outstanding body of work, using photography in an innovative way which has contributed significantly to placing the medium of photography firmly on the map of contemporary art. In his carefully staged and composed images, sometimes digitally altered, placed in back-lit boxes borrowed from advertising, he has explored a wide range of social and political themes including urban violence, racism, poverty, gender and class conflicts, history, memory, representation, and many others. His photographs, in color or in black and white, maintain a constant dialogue with great genre painting of the 19th century, and truly make him “a painter of modern life”, an expression coined by Charles Baudelaire.

In Jeff Wall’s photographs, the camera’s job is to register the effect that the invisible presence of the camera has on the world it inhabits. Without the camera, the effect would not exist; without the photograph, it would not be visible. The camera does not only register the world but also its own impact on the world.
Jeff Wall’s photographs, which at first seem to be documentary in nature, are often carefully constructed. Influenced by cinema and art history, Wall mixes documentary techniques with staged settings and digital collages of different images. This selection of images by the winner of the 2002 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography reflects both his interest in the pictorial practice of photography and in his subjects.