Jeff Wall’s Politics of Representation of the Other

Abstract

This article explores the photographic work of North American artist Jeff Wall. While his photographic work has been much discussed in terms of aesthetics and composition highlighting his methodological appropriation of modernist painters such as Eduard Manet and Piet Mondrian, the political aspect of his work remains to be investigated. This article especially unpacks the complicated dialectical relationship between the formal aesthetics and the political nature of his works by visiting his photographic work in the context of contemporary debates on the contradiction and conflicts between aesthetics and politics in photographic form. Ultimately, this article argues that Wall’s photograph acquires its political meaning by problematizing the reified social representation of the other in a way in which the materiality and/or otherness of the photographic object is registered within the photographic frame and by representing the violence of the social representation and the un-representability of the object/other.