2. Jeff Wall is a leading contemporary Canadian photographer. Working with a process similar
to that of Gregory Crewdson, Wall is concerned with ideas about the nature of images,
representation, and memory. His large-scale photographs appropriate the visual language of
advertising in their use of backlit transparencies and large scale. The subjects are
“cinematographic” reconstructions of everyday moments, fiction, and art history, which he
refers to as “near documentary”. “[Near documentary] means that they are pictures whose
subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that
experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and
accurately,” he said of his process.
Born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, he received his MA from the University
of British Columbia in 1970. Mainly focusing on academia during the following decade, he
studied with the famed British historian T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
A Conceptual artist and art historian until the 1980s, Wall began creating photographs styled
after artists including Hokusai and Édouard Manet as well as novels like the Invisible Man. In
2012, a print of his image Dead Troops Talk (1993) broke auction records at Christie’s and
became the third most expensive photograph ever sold at the time. Today, his works are held
in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Wall currently lives
and works in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.
Bio courtesy of art.net
![Jeff Wall is a leading contemporary Canadian photographer. Working with a process similar
to that of Gregory Crewdson, Wall is concerned with ideas about the nature of images,
representation, and memory. His large-scale photographs appropriate the visual language of
advertising in their use of backlit transparencies and large scale. The subjects are
“cinematographic” reconstructions of everyday moments, fiction, and art history, which he
refers to as “near documentary”. “[Near documentary] means that they are pictures whose
subjects were suggested by my direct experience, and ones in which I tried to recollect that
experience as precisely as I could, and to reconstruct and represent it precisely and
accurately,” he said of his process.
Born on September 29, 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, he received his MA from the University
of British Columbia in 1970. Mainly focusing on academia during the following decade, he
studied with the famed British historian T.J. Clark at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
A Conceptual artist and art historian until the 1980s, Wall began creating photographs styled
after artists including Hokusai and Édouard Manet as well as novels like the Invisible Man. In
2012, a print of his image Dead Troops Talk (1993) broke auction records at Christie’s and
became the third most expensive photograph ever sold at the time. Today, his works are held
in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Basel, among others. Wall currently lives
and works in his hometown of Vancouver, Canada.
Bio courtesy of art.net](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)