Jeff Wall: The Art of the Constructed Moment
Jeff Walls’s photographs aren’t just showing us the world, but rather, they are reconstructing it. They are often large-scale and meticulously composed, which gives his pictures a sense of how he is walking this fine line between realism and staged fiction. When looking at some of these pictures, we get this feeling that they are almost framed from a film that was never made or stemmed from a forgotten memory. Yet we know that every detail is deliberate. Every reflection, every gesture, down to every little smudge of light, is intentional. Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, 1999 Transparency in lightbox, 187 x 351 cm Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Purchased 2000 with assistance of the Ernst von Siemens-Kunstfond © Jeff Wall Something that set Wall apart for me is the way he blended the language of cinema with the stillness of photography. His work is about the event, not the instant. This is reinforced through one of his signatu...