Funny. I spend a whole year in Vancouver and I never see a Jeff Wall print face to face. But I go to Mexico City for just a week and I'm suddenly surrounded by some of my favorite photos by Wall at the Museo Tamayo.As you can read in that link above, the expo was a combination of documentary and cinematographic photos by the Vancouver
photographer, and it was curated in such a way that you couldn't tell which were which. Or could you? Well, for those of us who have studied Jeff Wall, the division was obvious. And the museum did provide a simple guide as to which photos belonged to which genre. Yet, I felt that the expo could have provided more clues or background information to understand the importance of Wall's work.
Quoting from Charlotte Cotton's The Photograph as Contemporary Art, "Wall's careful construction of a grouping of peripheral things prompts questions about our own relationship with photographs: Why are we looking at this? At what point in history and our own lives did a corner of a floor represented in a photograph become iconic, worthy of our attention? To what degree does it need to be abstracted by the seemingly innocent frame in order for us to recognize this grouping of non-subjects to be a still life? The beauty of Wall's photography is that, while it raises these complex questions, it still satisfies us as works of art" (131).
Anyway, don't miss it if you're in Mexico City...but definitely read The Luminist before you go.
1 comment:
Gracias por la introducción a dos fotógrafos que no conocía. No me quejo, aquí está Annie Leibowitz y Richard Avedon. Ojalá estuviera en DF, en el Tamayo y comiendo un chicharrón con Valentina a la salida. Cada quien su "style". Y que las imágenes benditas nos salven, de menos de esa mujer republicana que dice puras estupideces. Ya espero pronto tu post sobre las próximas elecciones. Saludos
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