Jeff Wall — Marian Goodman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → April 24, 2010

“The pictures I made between 1978 and 1982 showed me some paths I could take… how I could work in real places on themes derived for the most part from my own experiences, remembered and reconstructed. I guess that was the start of what I came to call my ‘near documentary’ pictures. I also think of those pictures as having a Neorealist quality, an affinity with both reportage in photography and the look of the films I liked from the 1950s on. My landscapes were straight photographs, so they showed me a way to at least begin to make that a part of what I was trying to do. … A number of the pictures I did in the 1980s were studio pictures even if they were done in real places. … I wanted to exaggerate the artificial aspect of my work as a way to create a distance from the dominant context of reportage, the legacy of Robert Frank and the others. I saw something else in photography, something to do with scale, with color and with construction, that might be valid along with the more established values that had come down from the 19th century and had been extended by the great photographers of the 20th. … Around 1988 1989… I turned back towards photography or in the direction of photography… Practically that meant making a different kind of picture than previously. Or at least different to some important degree. … These pictures were important to me; they opened up another way of working, less indebted to the dialectic of painting and cinema … and more connected to straight photography. I think you can see the consequences of that over the past 15 years.”… (from an interview b/w Jeff Wall & James Rondeau, in Jeff Wall: Catalogue Raisonné 1978-2004, Schaulager, Basel, 2005).