Detail from In Front of a Nightclub, by Jeff Wall
The sleeve of the Rolling Stones album Let it Bleed included the injunction, "This record should be played LOUD." A Jeff Wall photograph needs a similar imperative: "This picture should be seen LARGE."
The Vancouver-born-and-based Wall is famous for his backlit transparencies of scenes that have been meticulously staged and which are meant to hang on the wall in the same proportions as large paintings. Many are more than two metres long and two metres wide, and some surpass three metres in width.
So recreating them in a book is a difficult challenge, one that has been handed to the high-end publishing house Phaidon. The best that can be said is that, if you're going to look at a Wall photograph in a book, having the Phaidon name on the spine is the most you can hope for.
Wall, a darling of the Vancouver art scene and a Member of the Order of Canada, refers to his work as "cinematography," and views his function as that of a director, set designer, casting director and cameraman all rolled into one.
"A motion-picture film is really a long strip of material on which many photographs are printed," he writes in one of 10 previously published essays by him that are included in this collection (there are also another 10 reprinted magazine interviews and profiles, one published as recently as 2009, but most of them are from the 1990s).
"The images are projected at such a speed that we cannot perceive them properly and think we are looking at 'moving pictures.' But we are, in fact, looking at a large number of still photographs, and looking at them in a very peculiar way. This suggested to me that what is normally called 'cinematography' is something that can result in a still photograph; it didn't have to result in what we call a 'film.'
"I have always used the term 'cinematography' for my work because I felt that getting involved with performers, sets and so on - all that artifice - could open doors for me as an artist."
While he does shoot landscapes and cityscapes that he hasn't manipulated, Wall's most famous works are scenes that he recreates from real scenes he has witnessed, or are based on scenes from famous paintings, or themes from famous books.
See images from the book
Images like The Destroyed Room, the 1978 photo that first made his name, or The Mimic, are carefully staged and masterfully lit, and filled with detail that can get lost on the pages of even the most well-meaning reproduction in a book. In its original form, The Destroyed Room, for instance, is 159 x 234 cm - more than 5 feet high and 7-and-a-half feet wide.
Which means a viewer seeing it for the first time in a book might miss the carefully placed and intact porcelain figurine on the shelf in the corner of a room that has otherwise been ransacked. Or they might not notice that the room itself is clearly a set, and that the painted brick walls of the studio it was built in can be seen through the room's "windows."
In The Mimic, a man walking with his girlfriend makes an unseen racist gesture at another man - an event Wall witnessed in real life and turned into one of his tableaux through careful staging.
It's an artifice and a documentation of a real event at the same time, which is what paintings have always done. Photography, on the other hand, is supposed to document a real event, which places it in the past. It's Wall's deliberate goal to give photography the timeless quality of a painting.
"When you look at a painting you feel - and this is one of the magical things about painting - that it is always 'present time,' " he writes in the book. "The picture is always occurring right in front of you whenever you come to look at it. You never have the sense that what was painted has already happened somehow and that the painting is a record of it, a notation of its moment of existence.
"I think that photography has the capacity to disclose that feeling as well …"
The Phaidon book claims to feature "Wall's entire body of work," according to the jacket information, as well as recent works seen for the first time. There is also a complete chronology of all of Wall's many exhibitions, which include solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Tate Modern in London, England.