Going to a Jeff Wall exhibition is like watching 100 films at once. The pioneering Canadian photographer has spent decades creating highly stylised, minutely posed, ultra composed, totally fictional photographic scenes, all filled with enough details to send you spiralling down countless narrative rabbit holes.
Each scene is tightly scripted, no detail is accidental. A toddler flails on the ground in front of her frustrated father, a woman in a lab receives a call from a man in uniform, a couple sit lovelessly on a sofa, a cleaner mops a mansion. Every image contains the symbols you need to untangle the story it’s telling; they’re entire movies told in one photo.
But three images complicate matters: these small photos of filthy sinks and a mop in Wall’s Vancouver studio are not fictional, they’re of a real place, real things. But are they posed? Is the grime real? Is the soap a prop, is the mop actually that filthy? Then there’s a picture of some houses in LA, how could that be fictional, posed, constructed? A photo of a garden has nothing special in it, nothing to say. What fiction is it delineating?
Now all the lines between real and fake have been left so tangled that nothing can be separated.
Wall’s constant blurring of the boundary between real and fake, documentary and fiction, is dizzying, uncomfortable. He’s not asking you to sort real from fake, truth from lie, he’s forcing you to ask, over and over again: what’s the story? He’s forcing you to look at these images and find narratives, ideas. I don’t love them as photos, I think they’re so unnatural that you’re constantly reminded of Wall’s fictional intentions, and some of them are actively crap images. All of which breaks the magic a bit. But at their best, the effect is powerful.
Wall wants you to questions what you can reliably call the truth. And that, obviously, is the point: there is no truth. The work makes you realise that not only is nothing really real, but nothing is actually fake either. Everything exists on a continuum of authenticity. There is no truth, there’s only what you want to see, and what people want you to see.
