The Jeff Wall Show at MOMA

The MOMA retro presents about forty Jeff Wall photos going from 1979 until the present. His pics are BIG, an average photo measures about five feet tall and seven feet wide. Some of the largest are the most unforgettable; The Storyteller, and Night are both over fourteen feet wide. He uses a large state of the art view camera to capture both breathtaking outdoor and interior panoramas. He computer processes the images, often combining shots from different photo-shoots of the same event into one to create a wealth of visual detail. The final effect is of an immense color transparency (some like Night are black and white) lit from behind by an electric light box. The pictures themselves are not “real” but staged enactments. Wall hires actors or people on the street he wishes to depict and utilizes artificial lighting to get the desired image. Some shots are based on incidents Wall claims to have witnessed, (such as Mimic, representing an act of racial prejudice) or are solely products of his fertile imagination.

The photos are cheerless, humorless, and yet extraordinarily powerful. Aside from Wall’s dazzling technical virtuosity and the formal beauty of his visual composition, although these are obviously reasons enough to be moved by his work, By Films Possessed suspected her/his feelings went deeper. So BFP read up on Mr. Wall, checking him out on Wickipedia, reading the Roberta Smith review of the show in The New York Times, perusing the essay on the artist in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and finally the Peter Schjeldahl piece in The New Yorker. Smith’s overview seemed just fine if a little too theoretical for a layperson such as BFP. Ditto the magazine article. (Just what, exactly, is conceptual art?) Schjeldahl’s analysis, however, was bracing, critical, concise and, so typical of The New Yorker, marvelously fluid and clear. Thought BFP, “why, oh why can’t I write like that?”

After much deliberation, BFP understood where the strength of Wall’s work emanated from. It's rage: Wall’s photos feel the pain, the silent fury of the outsiders, those living on the edge, the tormented aggravation of all those invisible, unseen people on the margins. In Night, they are barely noticed—two apparently homeless figures and a dog crouching by the shrubbery. The Old Prison, presents a spectacular view of Vancouver, in the right of which is an institution inhabited by the unwanted. The Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party spotlights on the left a boy apart from the other young partygoers. Insomnia is a haunting portrait of loneliness and desperation. Volunteer, showing a young man cleaning up in the dining room of a halfway house or a shelter communicates his resignation and the room’s desolation. But enough already. Go see the show and connect to it in your own way.