Photography comforts or reassures observers when they recognize that it is a tiny sampling in time. Photographs fascinate us when they reconstitute or evoke the very conditions of existence: the effect of verisimilitude, threaded, moved, blurred by movement that is often impossible to document or keep still. Jeff Wall’s images have this ambivalent presence: they bear this relationship to the instant, and then, to duration. Everything is extremely still, captured in a fraction of a second or suspended artificially, if not lengthily immobilized. The artist uses the words "staged", "directed". But the uneasiness or fascination derived from his images arises from what is difficult, perhaps impossible, to believe at the fixed instant. Each image conjures its own movement.
Disturbance thus infiltrates this paradoxical zone, combining a temporal compression and a form of slowing-down of action or movement. This disturbance arises from an oscillation between snapshot and pose translated into images that encompass everything about photography — amateur photography (still life, landscape, genre scene) — namely by a mise en scène where every element is chosen, conceived to compose the "photographic tableau", so dear to Jeff Wall.1 Hence, a diversity of separately photographed instants can be integrated to a ground that, subject to processes of image manipulation, is meant to stratify, without ever thickening.
1. This expression is from Jean-François Chevrier, "Jeu, drame, énigme", Jeff Wall, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995, p. 17.
From the image as fetish (photograph), Jeff Wall seems to avoid staging fetishism (film) to develop what now, with time, is interpreted as a fetishistic relationship to staging. This relationship is at work in his methodical, obsessive concern with reconstituting a vision from a number of fragments, borrowing from photographic, filmic and pictorial works. Sometimes, the artist quotes textually. There are numerous essays by image theorists and art historians about Jeff Wall’s «dependence» on images that precede his — his way of seeing being diverted, informed, fueled by history. Occasionally, the artist evokes a picture or a scene from a film without systematically reconstituting it. It is then a question of atmosphere, pose, a quality of light or a division of space associated with a certain painter, filmmaker or photographer. But (and this cannot be overstated) everything is based above all on photographic properties. The artist thereby develops an esthetics of reference-displacement through skilful operations of appropriation. This arises from the time Wall spends reaching for the image, for the photographic tableau he structures. It arises through constructing the set, conceiving the accessories. This working method is a way to enhance the image, as much by the collected accessories and directed gestures and expressions as by the time necessary for the vision Wall wants to share with us to materialize. In such image-making, nothing is left to chance. Paradoxically, despite- or because of this control, there will always be room for the unexpected, the unforeseeable.
This exploration of displacement in Wall’s work — his vision — is so irreversible that snapshots such as In the Public Garden (1993) or The Crooked Path (1991) inevitably give the illusion of being constructed by him. This is largely due to the atmosphere of strangeness emanating from these images. Although captured in the instant, the reality framed by the artist becomes surreal through inexplicable inversion. With great economy, lucidity and clairvoyance, Jeff Wall here signals the revelatory power of reality over the observer and, at the same time, suggests that looking might primarily be a matter of montage, the product of endless, seamless associations.
In the Public Garden, 1993
The Crooked Path, 1991