Jeff Wall’s work, in comparison to Gregory Crewdson’s, is more of a halfway house. Again, it is tableaux, but it is often designed to recreate an actual moment. As stand alone images, you would think many of them to be ‘actual’ moments! I think the main difference that gives Wall’s work a sense of ‘honesty’, and in so doing, allows people to more easily accept them is the natural lighting that he uses.
Jeff Wall, Overpass, 2001
Much of Jeff Wall’s work involves stand alone images that have a lot to say, they have a lot of feeling about them. To get to the bottom of what it is that really gets under our skin, and makes us ask questions about the individual image, we have to deconstruct the image, to really discover the individual signs and pieces that give us what feelings we get. With some of the images that Wall produces, they are so ‘cluttered’ with items that are actually an integral part of the image, but are in danger of being overlooked. So deconstructing allows us to really lay out the nuts and bolts, and see how, when re assembled, they interact with other parts of the image. In doing so, we are also truelly understand the depth of these images.
The above image is full of ‘Mise en Scene’. Wall has been very clever in his creation of this image. He rented the apartment, and asked one of the models to live in it & furnish it. Over the period of almost a whole year, Wall would visit and take photograph. After the year he then selected items from the images and carefully stitched them all together to create a compilation of a years items & ‘things’ into one believable image. Wall had to be meticulous in his setting up of each scene, in particular, getting the lighting as close as possible, to make things ‘do-able’ within the post production process. There is more to this image than just the objects within the room, as the title suggests. However maybe now is not the time to look at this.
I see! 