jeff wall

His photographs tend toward narrative and classical, painterly composition, often alluding to historical artists like Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet (he did postgraduate research with Manet expert T J Clark at the Courtauld Institute in 1970-73), or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison. His themes are primarily social and political, including urban violence and alienation, racism, poverty, and gender and class conflict. Wall distinguishes between unstaged "documentary" pictures, like Still Creek, Vancouver, winter 2003, and "cinematographic" pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as Overpass, 2001. His signature works are large, light-boxed transparencies; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has also made large scale black and white photographs, some of which were exhibited at Kassel's Documenta X, as well as smaller color prints.

Mimic (1982) typifies Wall's cinematographic style. A 198x226 cm. colour transparency, it shows a white couple and an asian man walking towards the camera. The sidewalk, flanked by parked cars and residential and light-industrial buildings, suggests a North American suburb. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The man is dressed more formally, in a collared shirt and slacks. As the couple overtake the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, out of the girlfriend's line of sight. The picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its implicit social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist.

Born, living, and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wall has been a key figure in the city's vibrant arts scene for years. Early in his career, he helped define the so-called photoconceptualist paradigm for which Vancouver has become known; he published major essays on the work of his close colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace, and enjoyed a short-lived stint in the Vancouver art rock band UJ3RK5. His tableaux very often take Vancouver's spectacular mixture of sublime natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern featurelessness ('Terminal City') as their generic backdrop.

In 2002, he was awarded the Hasselblad Award. In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. ^[1]