Works in Focus – Introduction

Jeff Wall has played a key role in establishing photography as a contemporary art form. His innovative approach, characterised by large-scale photographic tableaux mounted in lightboxes, marked a radical new development in twentieth-century photography. Bringing together more than forty key works from the late 1970s to the present day, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of his work to date.

The traditional claim that photography represents 'truth' is highly contested, and it is this interface between truth and fiction, actuality and fantasy that Wall has chosen to explore. 'I thought at the very beginning that all my different directions would all be connected by means of working with that truth claim. But never in the same way,' he has commented.

Wall describes his photographs as being either 'cinematographic' or 'documentary'. The former are made in collaboration with performers, often involving sets, costumes and the kind of techniques normally associated with film production. The latter are straight photographs, and don't involve such artifice. While some of the cinematographic pictures are purely imaginary Dead Troops Talk, for example, in which a group of soldiers come to life and converse with each other – many occupy a middle ground between fiction and reality, being reconstructions of events the artist has actually witnessed. He refers to these reconstructions as 'near documentary' pictures.

Casting himself as a photographer of the modern world, Wall captures scenes of contemporary everyday life. But while many of his pictures convey notions of reportage and social observation, they avoid moral certitudes, remaining open and enigmatic. In the same way, though each picture appears to encapsulate a pivotal moment, it is left to the viewer to explore its potential narratives.

This invitation to the viewer extends to the way we physically respond to the works. Many of Wall's pictures are scaled to the human body – we could almost step into the frame - while the lightbox itself, as a three dimensional object, helps to activate the onlooker's relationship to the image and to the space in which it is displayed.

Jeff Wall was born in 1946, in Vancouver, Canada, a city where he continues to live and work.