We Can’t Paint

Perhaps the one characteristic of Jeff Wall’s photography I’ve always respected is his ability to take chances. He certainly wasn’t the first to digitally manipulate photographs or enlarge their presence in the gallery, but as a viewer you cannot help but realize that Wall’s contribution to photography has in some respects set it free from its perceived veracity. Also, like Ruscha’s series of gasoline stations and Winogrand’s photographs of women, Wall’s photography always feels as if it is a step ahead. When I was younger I remember seeing his work and being left perplexed as to what the actual meaning was, conceivably more so today when confronted with some of his wholly banal subject matter. However, this facet of an often po-faced academic approach is something that one should not necessarily count as being the fault of the artist, but rather it should be our own responsibility to take the time to invest in such things. I mean, is this not the main problem with the arts (fine arts)?

From November 3, 2007 until January 20, 2008 the exhibition Jeff Wall: Exposure, a selection of Wall’s new and old work, is on view at Deutsche Guggenheim. Scanning the museum’s website I noticed something interesting. Wall has a limited edition print titled Searcher, 2007 taken with a cell phone camera.

Searcher, 2007 © Jeff Wall

At first I wasn’t terribly shocked to find out that Wall has embraced and decided to use a popular form of photography such as the cell phone camera, but I was surprised at the price. The digital photo is a 13″ x 19″ (26.6 x 35.5 cm) inkjet print which can be purchased for 2,200 euros and is also signed by the artist. The Deutsche Guggenheim describes the image as follows:

Jeff Wall has long been interested in the language of realism, in the values and aesthetics of representing daily life. Many of the photographs on view in Jeff Wall: Exposure portray people in straitened circumstances - a traditional subject of documentary film and photography. On the occasion of his exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Wall has created an inkjet print entitled Searcher. He has captured with his cell phone camera a fleeting moment of life on the street. Although the moment captured is of seemingly small significance, it also resonates with the photo-grapher’s own existential search for subjects worthy of representation. In the case of Searcher, the figure bears a strong resemblance to Seurat’s late-nineteenth-century oil studies of field workers. And just as Seurat embraced the latest developments in optics and color theory to create pointillist scenes of everyday life, Jeff Wall uses one of the latest technologies for visualizing our world to represent life as it is experienced today, transformed into an abstract chromatic harmony.

Although it is interesting that the photo is an extension of Wall’s already varied practice, I can’t help but thinking that the value of the image itself is a product of an art market gone insane. While the photographs that Wall has produced throughout his career are strong and even sometimes deserving of their triple-digit prices, Searcher feels as if it was a last minute attempt at official exhibition swag. For 2,200 euros the Deutsche Guggenheim could have at least included a commemorative mug.