The status of photography in the museum has changed radically over the last twenty years.footnote¹ What had been a marginalized, minor and irregularly seen medium has become one of the major staples of museum display, and has taken its place alongside painting in terms of scale, sophistication and expense. The defence of photographic work in criticism and art history has acquired much of the portentousness and high seriousness that were once reserved for painting. This extraordinary development raises various questions: what has the museum done to photography in this accommodation (as well as vice versa)?footnote² How has it been framed, literally and conceptually? What are its viewers encouraged to think about it, and how? Has there emerged a form of photography, distinct from the mass of photographic production, that it is worth calling ‘museum photography’? One way to get a hold on these questions is to examine the remarkable career of Jeff Wall.

Wall, born in 1946, is one of the most prominent photographic artists on the contemporary art scene, and indeed one of the most successful artists working in any medium. His largest retrospective yet was held in 2005 in the vast spaces of the Schaulager, Basel, and was followed by a sequence of exhibitions in premier art spaces around the world (including moma, Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Guggenheim Berlin), and the publication of a catalogue raisonné of his photographic work to date, along with a collection of his writings.footnote³ But what is striking is not merely the production of the standard literature that would surround the reputation of any successful artist, but the degree to which his work attracts academic attention. An entire number of the Oxford Art Journal was devoted solely to its examination. In a special issue of Art History about ‘Photography after Conceptual Art’, no fewer than three of the ten articles carried substantial discussions of Wall. He has received sympathetic treatment from such figures as Hans Belting, Jean-François Chevrier and Michael Newman.footnote⁴ More recently, Wall has been taken as the major, and paradigmatic, figure of Michael Fried’s attempt to refashion the discussion of museum photography in the light of the themes that have sustained his writings since the 1960s: theatricality and absorption.footnote⁵ Wall is the ideal figure to examine here, not merely because he was one of the first prominent museum photographers but because his work has been most successful in generating a museum prose of the photograph.

Wall is unusual, among major artists, both in having academic training at doctoral level in art history, and in not migrating to one of the great international art centres, remaining in his native Vancouver, which has its own distinct and fertile art scene (one that counts Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham among its other major figures). Through teaching and example, Wall has had a great influence over younger generations of the city’s artist-photographers. Vancouver is the stage for most of Wall’s photographs, though the attraction is less its beauty and distinctiveness than the way in which it is typical of smaller post-industrial cities which lie beyond the major financial and cultural centres that compete with each other globally.footnote⁶ Wall depicts Vancouver, devoid of charismatic sights, as a place of unexceptional urban and suburban vistas in which human figures are carefully disposed. He makes scenes which are often seen as updates of Baudelaire’s vision of an art that would capture everyday life, and while the concept of the ‘everyday’ has certainly shifted in Wall’s work over the decades, he remains devoted to producing meticulous and elaborate reconstructions of mundane scenes and incidents.

Wall is best known for his large lightbox transparencies, which are photographic positives or slides encased in shallow metal cabinets, backlit with fluorescent tubes. The technique of backlighting is common in advertising, particularly at bus stops, but is also a magnification of the light-tables found in any professional photographic processor or art history department. The contrast and chromatic vibrancy of the slide greatly exceed those of any print, and Wall’s big pictures have long been among the most immediately impressive weapons in the museum’s photographic arsenal: these huge, illusionistic photographs of apparently everyday contemporary scenes are highly readable, in the sense that their every element is clearly identifiable, and their combination suggests a narrative. Wall rejects the idea that the lightboxes are in and of themselves critical objects pitched against advertising. Rather, he says, they are ‘a supreme way of making a dramatic photographic image’.footnote⁷ He was among the first artists in the new wave of museum photographers to realize the spectacular potential of the massive enlargement. Unlike the photojournalists from whose work he draws, Wall uses large format cameras to make big pictures that will withstand close examination. As with academic history or mythological painting, viewers shuttle between standing back to take in the whole scene and moving forward to inspect detail. Even now, when such large-scale photography has become a museum standard, Wall’s work offers a distinct combination of world-view, style, technical prowess and manufactured object.

In Wall’s most ambitious and complex works, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) of 1993, the image is assembled from numerous photographic elements, digitally montaged, much as a nineteenth-century history painting would have been brought together from many individual figure studies. (Indeed, Wall’s work appears to bear the traces of that technique, showing a slightly awkward interrelation of figures reminiscent of large-scale figure pieces by Ingres, for example.) While art history is invoked in the title, composition, scale and the posing of the figures, pieces such as Sudden Gust also have the look of movie stills, or rather of the publicity shots taken on the sets of movies by professional photographers. The area of Vancouver in which Wall has his studio became a major location for film and television shooting from the 1980s, and he drew on the available local resources in making these ‘cinematographic photographs’. The lightboxes subtly illuminate their viewers, and this, along with their size and their metal framing, elicits comparisons with Minimalism, which also sought to give the viewer a bodily experience of proximity to its carefully scaled objects. (This was the basis of Fried’s famous critique of the movement, which he thought played too directly and theatrically to the viewer, mugging for the camera, as it were, and allowing no room for the absorbed, timeless condition he thought necessary for true aesthetic appreciation.)footnote⁸

Most commentators assume that Wall’s depictions of everyday life successfully convey some social significance. Yet the exact meaning of his combination of formal, technical and iconographic elements is highly elusive, and has arguably become more so as Wall has developed the variety of his work through a series of highly considered contrasts. In one sense, Wall’s subject matter is of a piece with the standard territory of museum photography: in reaction against the kitschy and suspect power of the snapshot that seizes some dramatic (or worse, decisive) moment, everyday scenes, in which incident is downplayed or absent, are elevated through enlargement to apparently epic significance. Photographs by Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, to take two of the most prominent examples, visually dramatize the quotidian, finding (in a considered and conservative paradox) a charismatic visual expression for Weberian disenchantment. The size and expense of these works are far from incidental to their social use. What the museum demanded of photography has been comparable to what it demanded of video—inflation in size and insertion into installation, both pitched against the television screen and the experience of mass media generally, seeking to assure viewers that what art works offer is unlike anything merely reproduced. This is often accompanied by a pompous tendency to insist on its own profundity (a key example here being the work of and literature about Bill Viola).

To make such monumental photographs without the image becoming noticeably grainy, artists use plate cameras, large boxes which must be supported with a tripod. Large negatives require long focal-length lenses which in turn require small apertures to deliver much depth of focus. Only rarely can such cameras be used to freeze movement, and only when the photographer steps well back from a subject is the whole scene likely to be in focus. As Wall put it in one of his first texts, ‘by their unwieldiness and fixity, [these cameras] impose rigid terms on what can be successfully posed in front of them.’footnote⁹ They are well suited to giving a compelling, apparently comprehensive view of the mundane, taken from a distance that is both physical and emotional. Yet Wall’s distinctive move was to overcome those restrictions: his first solution to the problem was to pose figures before plate cameras, as in an advertising or fashion studio, simulating action. A second, in more recent digital pictures, has been to take a number of photographs of the same scene at different focus points, and then combine them to produce (say, in a technically challenging forest scene) a depth of focus that would be impossible with analogue means.