Jeff Wall
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Jeff Wall (born 1946) is a Canadian photographer.
Wall, Jeffrey (Jeff) David, artist (b at Vancouver 29 Sept 1946). Known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs, his theoretical writing and for his teaching, Jeff Wall received an MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970 (thesis on John Heartfield) and did postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute (1970-73). He was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-75); associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976-87); and is currently professor at the University of British Columbia. Jeff Wall is the best-known of a group of Vancouver artists including Ian WALLACE, Rodney GRAHAM and others who have associated together since the late 1960s. After experimentation with conceptual art while a graduate student at UBC, Wall produced no art until 1977, when he produced his first back-lit photo-transparency. The pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. Wall's strategy has been to recover modernist imperatives to rescue society from what he came to consider the dead end of conceptualism.
His central place in international contemporary art was established shortly thereafter when he appeared in a main European exhibition Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit (1939) curated by an old NSCAAD colleague, Kaspar König.
Wall's work is underpinned by the considerable body of his own theoretical writing that advances an argument for the necessity of a pictorial art. Much of the work pictures social tension, cities with changing demographics, intersections, suburbs and dead zones. Other work is much more enigmatic, fantastic and seemingly personal. Wall's photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets and crews as well as digital and computer postshoot manipulation. They have been characterized as one-frame cinematic productions rather than photographs in the ordinary sense. They address the history of painting more than the history of photography.
Mimic (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style. A 198x226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The man is dressed more formally, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, out of the girlfriend's line of sight. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.
Born, living, and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wall has been a key figure in the city's vibrant arts scene for years. Early in his career, he helped define the so-called photoconceptualist paradigm for which Vancouver has become known; he published major essays on the work of his close colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace, and enjoyed a short-lived stint in the Vancouver art rock band UJ3RK5. His tableaux very often take Vancouver's spectacular mixture of sublime natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern featurelessness ('Terminal City') as their generic backdrop.
In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. [1]
[edit] Mimic
the man in the denium jacket is not only giving the finger but also pulling back his eye, mocking the shape of the oriental mans eyes that he is passing by. Many of Wall's photographs focus on societal flaws.
