From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Craig Burnett: You recently described your photograph Echo Park (2023) to me as a view that just happens to make a good picture. Echo Park recalls other landscapes such as Steve’s Farm, Steveston (1980), Coastal Motifs (1989) or The Crooked Path (1991), which all depict the interaction of nature and human habitation. Is it possible to articulate what makes a good landscape, or what elements of Echo Park motivated you to make a picture?
Jeff Wall: I can’t articulate it because language is too vague and makes it sound like there are rules or guidelines that could define it. Steve’s Farm is clearly about the farming world that is being absorbed into suburbia. And if we think it is a good picture then we might think that a good picture needs to be about something that can be articulated in words. Echo Park doesn’t seem to be about anything, it’s just a chance point of view on a swathe of urban order.
I was drawn to the old housing project in the foreground with its slightly crooked sidewalk moving into the distance and the way you can see the inner space of the group of dwellings nestled in the larger neighbourhood. And I guess that might be the ‘subject’. But the picture as a whole, as a composition, somehow exceeded the apparent subject and became fascinating just as a composition of shapes and forms and colours and light. It seems kind of mute and doesn’t tell me much, if anything, about any particular subject I can recognise, but I like looking at it.
I asked you to articulate what makes a good landscape, but, as you imply, it’s not easy – there’s the quality of the work, and its subject, which are distinct. I’ve written about your work, so I’m sometimes asked to offer an explanation. I have an urge to say, ‘give it a good look first – experience it physically.’
There are obviously many things that can be easily explained about pictures – as I said just now about Echo Park. Or, for another example, why I decided to make Fallen rider (2022) – what sort of a place we are seeing in it. Or how that subject is treated in my picture in comparison with other versions of the same subject by other people. That’s all informative, all good. The more difficult thing to articulate is what makes Fallen rider a good picture – if you feel it is – and then of course, how good? Going into that question is probably beyond the scope of this discussion but let’s say for the moment that it takes us into all the fundamental questions and criteria about our evaluation of a work of art.
Echo Park (2023), Jeff Wall. Photo: courtesy Gagosian; © the artist
I mentioned how much I like Fallen rider, in part because of the attitude of the woman, though I’d need to write at length to understand why I like it. Both Fallen rider and In the Legion (2022) depict sudden movement, or its aftermath, recalling pictures such as Boy falls from tree (2010) or Milk (1984). To make these works, you conceive a tableau and set up like a film-maker – a method you call ‘cinematographic’. The process is controlled yet unpredictable. What do you learn from the unexpected along the way?
‘Cinematography’ doesn’t involve mimesis of film-making but it has learnt from the photographers who work in film. Photographs including living elements require motion capture. That capture is quite easy if you’re using smaller cameras with fast lenses in well-lit conditions, but it gets more difficult the further you get from that situation. In order to make larger prints I need larger negatives and that creates more severe technical problems for motion capture, especially if that motion is as high speed as required to freeze a body accelerating due to gravity, like the boy falling out of the tree, or moving across the field of vision, like the man in the midst of his backflip. So in order even to have a chance at an acceptable – that is, not blurred – capture I have to go through various kinds of preparation. Since each situation is different there’s no formula for how to get to where I need to be and I have to deal with each situation from its peculiar starting point. The first source of the unexpected or accidental is this process, because I can’t have a set technique. Once I get through that – if I do get through it and don’t have to abandon the project – I can attempt the actual motion capture. And since it will involve more or less rapid movement I can’t actually see what results I’m getting while I’m doing the photography. The boy falling from the tree can’t pretend he’s falling, he has to actually fall; the guy has to actually attempt a backflip. Capturing that instant as I want it is about as easy as a sports photographer getting just the right shot of a football player flying through the air catching a touchdown pass.
That’s a satisfying answer on one level because the nitty-gritty of how things are made is always fascinating. But I also wanted to ask a different question, about what happens during the process – how you came to the positions of the figures, for instance. Some pictures of football players are better than others. There’s an almost infinite variety of positions they could adopt. I’m interested in the degree to which the resulting picture emerges out of events you can’t control.
There isn’t much variety in those positions. Nothing in this kind of picture is ‘fictional’. As I said, the boy had to fall off that particular branch and I had to photograph him doing so. I photographed him numerous times because it was difficult to execute the capture properly. But he just had to keep letting himself fall off the same branch, no variety. I worked with the horsewomen to assess the behaviour of such a horse at such a spot and in that process determined where and how she would have landed given a specific movement by the animal. All of them knew what they were talking about because they’d all been thrown! They also knew a lot about how the horse would react. If the pictures have a convincing sense of physical (and emotional) actuality it’s because there is a lot of actuality involved in making them.
I want to ask you about ‘resemblances’, a word you’ve used before to describe how pictures across history echo each other. A zigzagging awareness of the backflip flashes through the faces of the people in In the Legion, evoking a similar phenomenon in Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c. 1648), while the first time I saw Fallen rider was in Basel, and the next day I saw Degas’s Injured Jockey (1896–98), which recalls your work, in the Kunstmuseum Basel. I realise you’re not alluding to these paintings, but there’s a pleasure, for me at least, in seeing these connections, connections distinct from genre.
I think picture making in the sense of the ‘tableau’ has elemental parameters that are present in every picture or even every attempt at a picture – the emphatic bounding of the illusion by the rectangle; the treatment of a ground plane, if there is one; scale in relation to universal scale, or ‘life scale’; and so on. Therefore a picture of one person and one horse will to some degree resemble another picture of one person and one horse. This ought to be the case even if neither of the two picture-makers had any awareness of the other.
Fallen Rider (2022), Jeff Wall. Photo: courtesy Gagosian; © the artist
Informant: An occurrence not described in chapter 6, part 3 of ‘Últimas Tardes con Teresa’ by Juan Marsé (2023) was commissioned by the city of Barcelona for a new exhibition at MACBA. It depicts a passage in the Marsé novel in which a woman informs on her lover, a motorbike thief, because she believes he prefers her rival. This is a work you have called ‘an accident of reading’, not unlike Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, 18 July 1994 (1994), based on Kafka, and After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue (1999–2000). Informant differs from these works because of the montage, the inset image of a man on the phone. A similar detail appears in the black-and-white photograph Rear, 304 E 25th Ave., May 20 1997, 1:14 & 1:17 p.m. (1997). Are they snapshots of the figure’s thoughts, or do they act like cutaways in a film?
It is an insert that permits the viewer to know that she is telephoning the police. In 304 E. 25th the smaller image was physically collaged to the larger one, making the work technically a photo-collage. That image permitted the viewer to get a sense of what the young woman in the picture was doing at that door. With Informant, there was no technical impetus to attach a second inkjet print to the larger one. That would be difficult to do without spoiling the large print with the adhesive, where that wasn’t a problem with the black-and-white traditional print. Since Informant is an inkjet print made from a digital file, adding the second image digitally is more true to the making process. Both these smaller superimposed images have a very simple, direct purpose.
The woman in Maquette for a monument to the contemplation of the possibility of mending a hole in a sock (2023) has a ghostly air, faced with the seemingly simple task of mending a sock. The photograph reminded me of a few of your works: Untangling (1994), Volunteer (1996) and Polishing (1998). What is it about tasks of maintenance that interests you? It has a sacred quality in your pictures, especially in Maquette.
I’d like to be able to give you a decent answer. But I don’t know. I don’t feel all that devoted to the spirit of those tasks though I do admire people who carry them out, and I like carrying them out myself. I find it offensive when people don’t take notice of the labour and commitment of cleaners and related workers, even in their own households. I guess that work suggests the fundamental and endless work of creating order, something primal. And I like to try to capture primal sorts of things – gravity, force, heat, light, motion, disorder, order.
In autumn 2005, you gave a talk at Tate Modern and I hosted the Q&A. When we turned to the audience for questions, a woman observed that a lot of your pictures depict broken figures in difficult situations, asking whether you had made any ‘happy’ photographs. I tried to come up with an example of a ‘happy’ picture, offering A View from an Apartment (2004–05). You interrupted me, saying that you always try to make ‘beautiful’ pictures, describing how the beauty of a picture is distinct from its subject matter. For me it was a salutary experience, making that simple distinction between form and content.
Yes, I’ve always said that my aim was to make beautiful pictures. I hope it’s clear that that means making them with the formal and technical qualities I’ve admired in the work of all the best artists I’ve admired and studied most of my life. I admit to having made quite a number of ‘downbeat’ subjects. I can’t really explain that aside from saying that many of those pictures, particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, were set off by things I was seeing almost daily in the neighbourhood of my studio in Vancouver. It was – and still is – in a troubled area of the city and, since I simply await the accidental appearance of whatever theme or subject that might strike me, I found quite a lot to do in that vein for a while.
There has to be some aspect of my personality that wanted to do that sort of thing, but I can’t define it. But I’ll let the admission stand. I feel, and hope, that you can look at any of those conflicted themes and still feel an exhilaration by the quality of the making, of the composing. I’d like to claim that all of those pictures can create a pleasurable aesthetic response not beholden to the social nature of the subject.
‘Jeff Wall’ is at Gagosian 541 West 24th Street, New York, until 21 December. ‘Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures’ is at White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 12 January 2025. ‘Unknown City Beneath the Mist. New Images From Barcelona’s Peripheries’ is at MACBA, Barcelona, until 12 January 2025.
Craig Burnett is the author of Philip Guston: The Studio (Afterall Books).
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.