`The photographer of modern life': Jeff Wall's photographic materialism

Abstract

In this article I explore the work of the Canadian artist Jeff Wall whose innovative photographic methods have come to challenge the traditional pictorial protocols linking the photographic image with its referent. Wall uses large format images enlarged on transparent synthetic film and mounted in lightboxes as a medium to explore various aspects of everyday life in capitalism. My main purpose is to reflect on the historical specificity and ontological complexity of Wall's turn to deep pictorial illusion. To do so, I argue that Wall's back-lit transparencies point to a re-materializing of longstanding historical connections between pictorial representation and art's social function as a relation of radical critique. Such traffickings between the `visual' and the `material' have increasingly become the source of debate with cultural geography and cultural theory more generally, and this article draws particular attention to the various patternings of landscape, spectacle, and everyday life that have come to characterize Wall's formal photographic repertoire. As I hope to show, not only does Wall's work give new credence to the notion of `representation' but it also testifies to a revivified engagement with the materialities of picture-making. Indeed, what is ultimately at stake in Wall's work is an emphasis on presencing the material possibilities that are, in his view, inescapably inscribed within the practice of photography.