Photographers in Focus: Jeff Wall

I try never to narrate what I'm doing I try and see what I'm doing entirely in pictorial terms knowing that what I'm doing is kind of suppressing their generic I've said it many times the viewer is right the poem of the artist he races in the process of making the picture so of course people are going to remarry non-narrative things that's kind of the magic of the whole thing my work is to not write it's a literary activity not writing I was painting drawing this young person from a very young age I guess I thought I would do that but in the 60s have you get to experiment and get restless like a lot of people I was still pretty young then and photography have charged in its in the way and for potential and novelty I used the word cinematography from my photography and the reason I use it is because it shares certain characteristics but the way photography is done fulfills essentially that just means there's some preparation done before the photographs taken but also there's some collaboration with other people whether it's performers or other people who make things for you kind of stagecraft I guess you'd call it I like the idea of inventing my own themes but once in a while I take the opportunities that pop up in front of me I had seen the woodcut that Hokusai had made in 1830 something of the same subject and it struck me as somehow intensely photographic obviously because the papers were captured in a way in a sort of instant inanity and just sort of released the idea that there could be a photographic expression somehow or this subject could be rendered again photographically I don't really want to take sides I don't think that's very interesting in that picture you have this bad guy and this good guy but I don't really want that identity to be too terribly fixed it's the only thing that could that I would imagine would come out of it is that they their view about a racial incident gets suspended such that they can't explain it to themselves right off the bat I'm trying to find a way to have the kind of identification those kind of identification suspend a little bit or at least hover so that you don't immediately jump to them so you might start wondering about this so-called bad guy or just seeing him more objectively you know we live in the palace we live in a political society all our relationships are political in some ways there's no way to avoid it that's inherent and it's probably inherited any pictorial or rendering in any medium that you know relation between one figure and the other is somehow mediated political in that sense but it's not political in the sense that I'm trying to make any points I wasn't trying to necessarily say anything about the Afghanistan war I thought oh we could have a dialogue of the dead but really it's more interesting if they were soldiers because they would have been killed in a cause not their own but he's not personal and that kind of lifted the dimension of the whole dialogue into something else raised it and made it more broad and I thought that could be fascinating to make gigantic warf hallucination I think Paul part is always an expression of the affection for there being a world and there's something to see what you know that there is even anything exists it's already kind of joyful relation to what is and then everything else kind of you know becomes a detail but they've all are just are pretty sympathetic people they're sympathetic of being and I think that's why people like art [Music] [Music]

Channel: NOWNESS

Views: 91,078

Keywords: short film, NOWNESS, Jeff wall, Photography

Id: rtmUPQFEJrs

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 24 2019