Jeff Wall

One of the aspects of Jeff Wall’s work that I enjoy is how he confronts the concept of truth/reality and documentation in photography. The manner in which he tackles the topic of racism and combines it with this questioning of reality is very interesting, specifically in his work Mimic, in which we see a white man walking with his significant other and making the racist gesture of narrowing his eyes to mock the Asian man walking near them. This photograph is more complex than it first appears because the individuals are staged in that environment to be acting out a scene that occurs naturally in everyday life. More simply put, while events like this really do happen, the truth in the photo is questioned because the audience is incapable of knowing for certain if this racist act is naturally occurring, as it appears to be in the photo.

One comment that Wall makes in his video that I deeply agree with is that journalists are interested in conveying an event to the viewer, while an artist is interested in conveying a representation of that event. This is a concept that I have witnessed in paintings by master contemporary painters, and its wonderful to me to see this additionally in photography, especially when so many people rely on assume photography to be an exact representation of reality, and only taking photos for their face value without putting any thought into their meaning. This idea of looking beyond face value of what is depicted in a photo I feel is represented in Wall’s Restoration, 1993, in which he has photographed a 360-degree room, but has captured exactly one half of the space, 180 degrees. By capturing only one half of the space, it includes the excluded, which is reinforced by the woman standing off to the side staring into the excluded space, allowing the viewer to acknowledge that there is more truth to this photo that cannot be seen, but must be acknowledged.