THE Q&A: JEFF WALL, PHOTOGRAPHER

Jeff Wall has been credited with validating photography as contemporary art. For his large-format works (he calls them “prose poems”, borrowing the term from Charles Baudelaire), he routinely employs actors to help realise his vision. Roles range from deceased soldiers who converse in the afterlife ("Dead Troops Talk") to weekend warriors who preen outside a nightclub ("Outside a Nightclub"). Wall then digitally manipulates the images and presents them as back-lit phototransparencies, so that the photographs glow. These arch, staged tableaux have a dreamy effect, odd and cinematic.

Phaidon just released a definitive account of Wall’s work to date— "Jeff Wall: Complete Edition", a 280-page monograph that includes Wall’s own writings as an art historian and theorist. In the days before the book's release, we struck up an e-mail correspondence with the Vancouver-based conceptual artist. While he was content to leave some answers at "Yes" or "No" (including an inquiry into his decision to not carry a camera), he also succinctly held forth on such topics as the tiresomeness of film, the trouble with historical references and how art can teach us about survival.

More Intelligent Life: Considering that your work usually appears in a large-scale format, how well do you think it translates on paper in a monograph?

Jeff Wall: I don’t think my pictures look very good in books, but still, the better the book, the better they look—or the less they seem inadequate. They are made to be a certain size and scale and that can never be captured on a page. I like the new book very much, but I prefer to look ahead, not back.

MIL: Part of your process involves not carrying a camera—has there ever been a time when you’ve regretted not having a camera with you—even if it’s not for professional reasons?

JW: No.

MIL: You have often commented on your attraction to the commonplace. Is there something less appealing to you about focusing on the extraordinary?

JW: I don’t prefer one or the other. I think I have paid attention to the "extraordinary". But in general I think it’s more interesting to recognise the interrelation of what is ordinary and what is extraordinary, rather than seeing them as two separate entities, or ways.

MIL: Your laborious work habits have become something of a trademark. Has there ever been a point where you’ve stopped and questioned the lengths to which you’ve gone in order to achieve your vision?

JW: I don’t see it as laborious and, also, I’ve made most of my pictures with relatively less effort. There are only a few that have gotten complicated and taken a long time—like "A Sudden Gust of Wind" (pictured, detail), or "A View From an Apartment". Each picture is different, each requires some kind of commitment, and I simply do what is required each time.

MIL: Some of your work contains historical art references—how important to you is it that the audience recognises these references?

JW: Only a few pictures have those references, and in those cases the references are very overt. But most of my pictures have nothing to do with making those references—or any references. When I make some reference, I do it because it seems necessary for that picture. Necessary to me, but not to the viewers. If the picture is any good, people will be able to appreciate it and not recognise any similarity to another picture.

MIL: Early in your career you collaborated on a film with Ian Wallace and Rodney Graham [both Vancouver-based artists]—after which you shunned the genre entirely. What turned you off to film?

JW: Films have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. I find that tiresome. Pictures just have a middle.

MIL: When was the last time you were surprised or impressed by a work of art?

JW: Just right now, looking across the room at a Walker Evans. It's a picture in my collection—the one of the photographer's studio window with dozens of little portraits and the word "STUDIO" printed across the image. I'm impressed by works of art all the time.

MIL: Do you think that photography makes it possible to capture an authentic moment?

JW: Yes.

MIL: Though you are interested in everyday moments, you have also expressed an interest in artifice. Do you find any inspiration in places that are overtly artificial—Las Vegas, Disneyland, Dubai?

JW: I might. But I don’t think "artificial" places are particularly artificial, or particularly different from other places.

MIL: Of the decision to use light boxes in your work, you’ve said, “It’s really important to me that art gets old”. Can you explain why?

JW: I have gotten so much enjoyment and inspiration from works of art since I was a child, and most of the art that I saw was decades or centuries old. So, the ageing and surviving of art seems a central aspect of its value to us. It tells us how we both are and are not contemporary in our own time, and how such a thing as survival is possible, and how we can relate to it, even though we are all mortal.

"Jeff Wall: Complete Edition" (Phaidon Press), out now

~ MELISSA GOLDSTEIN