{"id":236190,"date":"2025-10-24T05:34:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/236190\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T05:34:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T05:34:09","slug":"photographer-jeff-walls-constructed-imagery-demands-a-second-look-at-moca-retrospective-in-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/236190\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Jeff Wall\u2019s constructed imagery demands a second look at MOCA retrospective in Toronto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Mounted as a transparency in a lightbox, 1992’s Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), demands the viewer look twice.Jeff Wall\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In the era of the seemingly infinite camera roll and the frighteningly convincing deep fake, looking long and hard at images is more important than ever. A lot of visual art is simply about seeing; it encourages slow looking and trains the discriminating eye. <\/p>\n

The first time I saw Jeff Wall\u2019s photograph Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter, 1986), several decades ago, I was momentarily shocked by the gore in this scene of bloodied Russian soldiers, apparently dying on a roadside. <\/p>\n

And then I looked longer and noticed the smiles on several faces. One soldier cheerfully prods the gaping hole in his abdomen. The image was a self-acknowledged fake \u2013 or at least, it wasn\u2019t about the gore, it was about the creation of the scene, harkening back to grand history painting, to question the way art stages heroism and tragedy. <\/p>\n

That orchestrated photograph dating to 1992 is part of a major Wall retrospective currently showing in Toronto at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It\u2019s a rare opportunity to consider the Canadian artist\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

Wall, who turns 80 next year, has not had a major show in Toronto in 35 years, and in Canada in 27 years. So, with more than 50 photographs spread over three floors, the MOCA show is more Wall than most Toronto art lovers have ever seen. Presenting both the large-scale lightboxes he has created since the 1980s and the more recent inkjet prints, as well as a few black-and-white photographs, it reveals the artist as a deep and meticulous observer whose images then demand the same attention from the viewer.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Wall is a formalist \u2013 a master of light, composition and depth of field. In Echo Park, he observes the many layers of a Los Angeles neighbourhood, with streets of houses giving way to the hills in the background while a construction site fills the foreground. He gives the title Diagonal Composition to a series featuring an old metal sink and worn linoleum floor in some industrial setting, as though the form were more important than the content. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

With Passerby, a gelatin silver print of 1996, artist Jeff Wall began to experiment with black and white photography.Jeff Wall\/Supplied<\/p>\n

In Passerby, a 1996 foray into black-and-white photography, he splits the nighttime composition in two to show he has achieved pure black in a dark passage on the left and pure white established by a wall on the right. <\/p>\n

And yet he is also a social photographer, although discreetly so: That nighttime scene in Passerby of two people crossing on a sidewalk captures a certain familiar sense of urban threat, a stranger glimpsed from the corner of one\u2019s eye. <\/p>\n

His subjects, sometimes observational but frequently constructed, often depict figures on the margins or under duress: A man enters a pawnshop with his precious electric guitar; an Indigenous storyteller gathers her audience beside a highway overpass; a shirtless man kneels on the ground as a threatening group looms over him in a 2015 piece ironically titled Listener. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeff Wall’s Children of 1988, seen here installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, features nine images of children enshrined like angels against puffy clouds.LF Documentation\/Jeff Wall\/Supplied<\/p>\n

More obviously, a series called Children lionizes the young. These nine circular portraits of children of various ethnicities, each one set against a blue sky and puffy clouds, are displayed on MOCA\u2019s ground floor. The work, designed for a children\u2019s pavilion that was never built, borrows the tondo format of Renaissance art that was usually reserved for images of the Virgin Mary, angels or biblical scenes. <\/p>\n

For all that conscious evocation of historical art, Wall can also work in a pure documentary style. The exhibition includes a superb black-and-white close-up of the bark of a tree that dwells lovingly on its whorls, lines and gouges. <\/p>\n

Wall also does a sideline in images of detritus, in which every detail is tellingly observed. An abandoned suitcase spills a few scraps of clothing on to pavement littered with takeout coffee cups, scraps of paper and the bright plastic packaging for some garbage bags. The staining bench at a Vancouver furniture manufacturer is covered in years\u2019 worth of splatter and drip. <\/p>\n

But perhaps Wall rearranged the pots of stain to improve his composition. There is a documentary element to his work, but its most famous and most contentious aspect is the way he constructs images. His reputation is as a conceptual photographer, and criticism of his work has focused on the staging involved in tableau photography, in which models and sets are used to create scenes. Dead Troops Talk, for example, was created in the artist\u2019s studio, not in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Jeff Wall retrospective at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art includes inkjet prints Echo Park of 2023 (on left) and The Gardens triptych of 2017.LF Documentation\/Jeff Wall\/Supplied<\/p>\n

But there is nothing dishonest about that 1992 work, nor The Vampires\u2019 Picnic of the following year, which shows about a dozen contemporary figures, both vampires and victims, in a gruesome nighttime melee. It\u2019s clear they are fictional; that is the point.<\/p>\n

Similarly, a viewer observing the mysterious triptych entitled The Gardens \u2013 in which masters and servants in a formal Italian garden consider their instruction sheets \u2013 may not be able to piece together a narrative, but will surely notice that the models are duplicated within one photograph. In the centre image, a man in chinos and a dress shirt stands right beside himself. The effect is surreal.<\/p>\n

In other places, the constructed aspect of Wall\u2019s images creates a sense of displacement or even threat. Our sense that a given scene, no matter how pedestrian \u2013 a recalcitrant child lies on the pavement; partygoers leave a nightclub \u2013 has been created for the camera commands our attention, and provokes us to consider the depicted more seriously. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s revealing about this event or this moment? The photographer makes choices and the myth that the camera simply records the truth is dramatically exposed.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

To create Boy falls from tree of tree, a lightjet print of 2010, Wall asked his young model to fall repeatedly.Jeff Wall\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Wall himself doesn\u2019t like the word \u201cstaged,\u201d with its connotations of theatre. He instead prefers to compare his work to a film, where you produce, curate and direct until you get the picture you want. At the press opening for his exhibition, he assured me that Boy falls from tree of 2010 was created with a child who repeatedly fell from the tree and who was scared every time he did it. <\/p>\n

So yes, the boy really fell, but instinctively, the viewer knows there is something uncanny about the existence of this picture, so perfectly lit and composed. <\/p>\n

Sports photographers occasionally capture a moment like this \u2013 or the one in In the Legion, where a man does a back flip in the midst of a crowd of inattentive drinkers \u2013 but the viewer senses Wall\u2019s image was not serendipitous, and studies it more seriously for that. <\/p>\n

Wall is in the lifelong business of image-making, creating riveting constructions that ask us to look twice. <\/p>\n

Jeff Wall Photographs 1984-2023 continues to March 22. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Mounted as a transparency in a lightbox, 1992’s Dead Troops Talk (a vision…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,2922],"class_list":{"0":"post-236190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-noastack"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}