Jeff Wall has long been championed as the master of slow looking. Back in 1985, the year before he turned 40, the British Columbia-born artist received a tip from a close friend. He had, by that point, published landmark scholarly essays, held professorships and made some seminal images, though not that many. His friend had seen a woman fall off her horse, and thought that was something Wall should photograph. “He said: ‘That kind of looked like a subject you could do,’ and I totally disregarded it because I just wasn’t interested at the time. But, two years ago, it came back to me.”
Over the past 40 years, Wall has utilised the speed and precision of photography to make exquisite, arresting works based on furtive moments just like this. Ask him how he decides what to shoot and he’ll likely say he’s not sure. Somehow, a vision bubbles up to the surface of his mind. As the viewer, the work he makes in response demands your stillness.
Fallen Rider (2022, pictured right) is one of the 43 key works that populate Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures, an exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey. It shows an elegant thoroughbred wearing a black saddle standing in quiet profile, with a blond woman in short black sleeves and helmet, lying on her side in the manicured lawn beyond. The clipped serenity of the sunlit scene belies the titular accident that, we’re given to imagine, must have preceded it. “The cinematography I’ve tried to develop,” says Wall, “is just really about having total freedom to move from any unknown starting point into a photograph, by whatever means necessary.”
Wall’s images are artificially set up, sometimes in real locations, other times on sets, with people hired to play characters. He doesn’t work by theme or in series. Instead, rather, each new work comes with its own set of skills to learn and tasks to complete in order to get it done. “I’ve tried hard not to have any set pattern of how to do things, because that’s not interesting,” he says. The resulting image is all that matters.
Of course, any viewer taking in four decades of work is going to be pulling at threads to knit stories and identify themes. Mimic, from 1982, recalls a moment of racial discrimination Wall witnessed on the street: a man with an oblivious woman on his arm makes an offensive gesture towards an Asian man walking past them on a downtown pavement. The 2000 piece, A Man With a Rifle, riffs on a similar “angry-man thing”, Wall concedes: a man squats between two cars on a tree-lined pavement, aiming an imaginary gun at an invisible target.
Gravity and relational tensions between people runs through much of the show. Works feature bodies aloft, falling or floored. “There’s something that pictures do that is gravitational,” says Wall. “It has to do with the slowing down of everything to stillness.”
This highlights both the metaphorical power of Wall’s work and his technical brilliance. He still works on film and does all his own prints, many of which stand more than two metres tall. “To make a larger print, I have to use a larger camera, which makes capturing motion very difficult.”Boy Falls from Tree (2010) is based on the perfectly intact memory Wall has of doing just that as a kid. To set the shot up, he first worked with a stunt faller to figure out how to make the fall convincing. A boy from the neighbourhood, called Riley, stopped by during prep and asked what they were up to. When he said he’d like to try, Wall hired him. The resulting image shows Riley almost cartwheeling off a branch as tall as the roof of the garden shed beyond. What is interesting, Wall says, is the technical challenge the photograph posed – falling happens so fast – but also the image’s relatability. Everyone falls. “It’s a universal experience that anyone can relate to in a serious way. I’m drawn to subjects that anyone can relate to without having to make anything popular.”
Wall to Wall: five seminal works
After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999-2000
Wall learned to wire old-school lighting in order to recreate in his Vancouver sutdio the basement room that Ellison describes, with its 1,369 lightbulbs, in his novel Invisible Man. “Because I work so singularly, each picture tends to create problems that I never had before.”
The Thinker, 1986
This allegorical figure of a hunched man with boots and a sword sitting on a strange column of breeze blocks and log references Rodin’s eponymous masterpiece and a drawing Albrecht Dürer made for an unrealised monument. Wall describes his Thinker as exemplifying “some complicated problem”.
The Flooded Grave, 1998–2000
It took Wall two years to make this surreal image of a dug-out tomb filled with water and abundant aquatic life. He describes it as the realisation of the kind of “hallucinatory, synaptic flashes” we all have: “that sort of weird vision that’s gone before you know it.”
Listener, 2015
Place is crucial to the potency of Wall’s works. The uneven ground in the California desert location – and his tight crop – create all manner of “torques and tilts” within this grouping of characters, adding to the emotional tension: “It’s one of my most serious pictures. It has a lot of implications that others don’t necessarily have.”
In the Legion, 2022
In a sedate 70s interior, all red carpet and wood panelling, amid tables of suburban drinkers, a plaid-clad dude does a somersault. Wall likes how the image has a sort of levity to it, without being comical. “Resisting gravity for a moment. It’s like the early discovery of photography’s instantaneousness. People have never not been fascinated by the stopping of motion.”
Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures is at White Cube Bermondsey, London, to 12 January.
