THOMAS DEMAND, JEFF WALL AND SHERRIE LEVINE: DEFORMING ‘PICTURES’

Abstract

What are we to make of the return of the ‘picture’ in photography after conceptual art? In this article I engage directly with the lineage provided by Jeff Wall for his own brand of ‘pictorialist’ photography, and his surprising appropriation of Sherrie Levine to this end. I suggest that Wall's gesture of appropriation and the structure of his own works reveal a more irrational sense of the ‘picture’ as a force of deformation which may usefully be extended to the work of Thomas Demand. I argue that Demand's work does not support the terms of modernist aesthetics, and in particular, cannot be credibly interpreted as founding photography as a ‘medium’, as Michael Fried has suggested. Instead I argue that Demand's work presents photography as parasitic and bound in an irrational relationship to sculpture. Neither medium is self‐supporting and each is instead ‘propped’ on the other, forced to cohere by the deforming operations of the ‘picture’.