A Mistaken Review: Jeff Wall, Life in Pictures

I have forgotten where the White Cube is in Bermondsey and my friends turn right before I realise we are there. The courtyard outside is deceptively empty and we are immediately hit by crowds as we enter the gallery to see Jeff Wall’s exhibition, A Life in Pictures, celebrating 30 years of collaboration between artist and gallery. Born in 1946, Jeff Wall is best known for his backlit transparencies which he started making in 1978, referencing cinema, classical paintings and literature in his work. I am sceptical. I have rarely enjoyed a White Cube exhibition and find their bookshop inaccessible in its refusal to sell cheap postcards in favour of £50 books. The main corridor is crowded, and I am already anxious.

On the right as I walk along the central corridor, from which more rooms branch off like arteries, there is a line of three photographs that catch my eye. In the first, a woman sits in a car in the sunlight with perfectly manicured nails, Adidas socks, beautifully pleated trousers, and a gold watch. It looks like an advert. The next photo is a fraction of the size and shows a giant nude of an aging woman standing in the middle of a library. Backlit, she floats, although casting a shadow on the ground around her. In a sea of staged and documentary style photographs, the enlarged nude is a welcome jolt. She stands at a 45-degree angle to the viewer, and I want to know if she is photoshopped or superimposed. The next photo, a nostalgic backlit garden, is beautiful, but returns to conformity and aesthetics. On the other side of the hall, there are a few smaller photographs, all backlit to the point of glowing, showing small snippets of dirty corners. A mop and bucket on a cracked floor; a stained sink; an old bar of soap with dirt in the cracks; a cloth coming in or out of a tumble dryer. These photographs make me smile and feel at home in the familiarity and claustrophobia of the tight framing. The glow from the lightbox feels cinematic and I almost wish these were blown up to the size of the others in the exhibition, big enough to engulf all the people in the gallery.

Back among the many other rooms opening out from the central corridor and I immediately feel lost. There is seemingly no theme to the rooms or order to the images- none of them labelled with titles or dates- and some pictures feel welcomingly out of place. There are a few photographs dotted about the rooms that share similar traits, my favourites being a man doing a backflip in a pub, and a person falling off the top of a shed. They are both captured mid-air and share the same surrealistic surprise as the nude in the library. I wonder if these are also superimposed and digitally manipulated and not actually real occurrences.

Many of the photographs in the exhibition bore me with their impenetrable perfection, their faultless staging, their high-quality imaging. The backlight somehow enhances their perfection, creating a religious air of untouchability that, instead of being awe-inspiring, is dull. I found out later as I read about Wall’s techniques and inspirations that the backlighting is an homage to bus station advertisements. I’m not sure, then, if the dullness would be considered a success. Certain images feel staged and costumed to the smallest detail that they look fake and cliché. A large photograph of two boys boxing in a living room has such perfect décor that it looks like they are in an IKEA advertisement. This staging is admitted in a pair of photographs, which are both framed by a stage, curtains on either side, theatre lights, and a dark wooden stage floor: A couple in a play, and a group of dancers doing what looks like the can-can. I now understand the point and realise that I have been caught out, understanding the joke too late. I have been walking around the gallery on my high horse thinking how silly the photographs are and how soulless they seem to be in their impenetrable light and boredom. I thought the photographs were trying to be documentary style images and imagined criticising them in their stillness and lack of life, when they have been pretending all along and are aware of and proud of causing my mistake. I have been tripped up.

At university, a friend was told that her art was the kind only a woman would make. Are these photographs the kind only a man would make? In their lack of depth; their attempt to capture interiority to only end up with a shallow image that feels pasted together; their cliché and their advertisement cleanliness. But Wall is aiming for advertisement and theatricality, so perhaps he has hit the nail on the head. In reminding us of advertisements, Wall brings up the never-ending question of where the line is between fine art and media, or fine art and cinema, and photography has always walked along this line, playing between the themes and subject matter of both.

The backlighting on many of the photographs aids in the cinematic, along with the larger-than-life pieces that are so big it feels like they are trying to absorb you into their own internal world. In a side room, one photograph of the desert is filled with so much perfect blue sky that it reflects the entire gallery behind me like a mirror. I watch people move to and fro for a while through the blue sky, and even try to glimpse into the other photographs nearby. I imagine the desert to feel the same way. A blue sky so clear it reflects your face. I watch my friend come up behind me and put their hand on my shoulder. They are overwhelmed and ready to go.

edited by Cormac Nugent

Image - Ocula