If one can measure the importance of an artist by whether an attempt has been made on his life, then Jeff Wall is up there with Andy Warhol. In 1996, the Canadian photographer was offered the position of professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art—the world's most prestigious academic photographic gig. It was from here that the legendary German photographer Bernd Becher had taught and launched a new photographic school led by Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. Wall accepted the offer. His classes were oversubscribed, and some students got turned away. One was so disgruntled that he showed up with a loaded gun. Wall was shocked. He resigned and returned to Canada. Wall's photographic images reveal, above all else, the symbolic moments of everyday life, so it's a shame that he has never recreated this event as a work. It could represent the violence implicit in celebrity culture.
Wall has the stature of Becher and his star pupil, Gursky. Like Gursky, he has legions of weak imitators today—in Britain, notably Hannah Starkey and Sarah Jones, whose images of young girls in scenes of sexual tension represent the lowest common denominator of the Scuola di Wall. But Wall's work is intellectually and stylistically at the opposite pole from Gursky. Gursky shoots vast panoramas of globalisation—a crowded rave party in full flow, a skyscraper full of open-plan offices, a multi-level hotel atrium. But Jeff Wall usually shoots intimate constructed scenes with no more than a handful of figures, and always with a grindingly obvious moral message.
There's Volunteer from 1996, in which a forlorn man in an overall mops a Formica floor in an empty institutional children's playroom. Or Outburst, set in an Asian sweatshop in which a manager waves his fist at an employee seated at a sewing machine. Or The Quarrel, which shows a couple in a bedroom at night. A man sleeps on one side of the bed—on the other his partner sits upright with the bedside light turned on. There are some crumpled Kleenex on the side table. If a painter did scenes like this, he would be laughed out of court. So why can a photographer get away with it?
To answer that question we need to identify Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky and Bernd Becher as "art photographers." It's an odd bit of aesthetic terminology, art photography. If I use it in conversation, I feel the need to add very quickly, "a photographer whose photos are shown in art galleries." It's a term designed to section off and elevate a small group of photographers from photojournalists and anyone who claims to capture Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" of reality (except that, confusingly, Cartier-Bresson is now thought of as an art photographer as well as a photojournalist). Art photographers manipulate the photograph's promise of reality to expose the way the photographic image is as constructed as a painting. It sounds like a tedious bit of poststructuralist theory, but it has led to some fascinating photographs. In Gursky's work there is always a contradiction between the majestic scale of the vista and the banality of what is in it, and between the realism of the image and its conformity to the rules of composition of paintings.
Wall is more overtly political than this, and can be grouped loosely with leftie photographers from the 1980s like Victor Burgin and Mitra Tabrizian, who freeze-frame moments of neocolonial, patriarchal, globalised or whatever else oppression. But Wall's work is not a straightforward exposé of female exploitation or the evils of globalisation. Rather it mimics the values propagated by its enemy. Wall's practice is, in fact, eerily old-fashioned. What he produces are not photographs so much as photographic pictures. The shot is carefully constructed, the people meticulously positioned, the details endlessly fascinating and poignant. They are composed as artfully as a Claude Lorraine landscape. They are the direct descendant of 19th-century genre painting—with its women knitting crochet, peasants bringing in the harvest and lonely pine trees atop snowy mountains, all bludgeoning the viewer with a moral message. Wall has used poststructural theory—which, with its feminist and postcolonial discourse, is itself a kind of modern ethics—to update with his camera a forgotten and rather despised kind of painting. He reverses the photograph's "indexical" claim to show reality by photographing something obviously constructed. But the photograph still nags at us with its culture of the captured moment. Wall's photos mesmerise with their familiarity—they are stories we immediately recognise from the world of cinema, television and the urban environment. They are sentimental and clunky. They're meant to be. They're about the clumsiness with which media and corporations impose their ethics on us.
The realism of the photograph allows Wall to reach epic levels of naffness which make the genre painters look subtle. Typical of this is his photograph The Crooked Path. The title is biblical while the picture shows a zigzag of burnt grass leading across a wasteland towards the distant grey rectangle of an edge-of-town superstore.
Jeff Wall Photographs is at the Tate Modern, 21st October 2005-8th January 2006
