Jeff Wall: Selected Essays And Interviews

JEFF WALL: SELECTED ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007

I was interested in the way cinema affected the criteria for judging photography. Cinematography permits, and validates, the collaboration between photographer and subject that was largely excluded in classic documen tary terms. That exclusion limits photography, and so my first moves were against it—working in a studio with all the technical questions that implies. I had to learn some of that technique as I went along; that process was part of transforming my relationship to photography. At the beginning it was done in the spirit of contestation, but as I’ve said, it was not so long before I realized I’d lost that contest and realized that nothing I was doing was “outside of photography.”

At that point—in the mid 1980s—I felt I’d worked myself into a position where I needed to come into a new relationship with the kind of photography I’d been questioning. As I saw more of the “new” photography in exhibitions through the ’80s, I began to realize that I preferred Walker Evans or Wols to most of the newer work, and I preferred them to my own work, too. Classical photography might have been displaced from the center of attention by the newer forms, but it was not diminished in the process. It became stronger through having been confronted with alternatives, as far as I was concerned.

—Jeff Wall in conversation with Jean-François Chevrier, Paris 2001