Confronting Jeff Wall

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Jeff Wall: Picture for Women

by David Campany

Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s Picture for Women (1979) is one of his most ‘compelling and debated images’: it is a ‘confrontational’ and ‘recalcitrant’ artwork .This book introduces Picture for Women in detail. The artwork is a colour transparency illuminated from behind by fluorescent tubes, a method of presentation with which Wall is usually identified and, for David Campany, attractive but agitating and distracting, refusing the ‘settled calm’ that sustained contemplation needs.

Campany is fascinated by Picture for Women’s contradictory and anomalous character, especially compared with how photography usually functioned either in modernism and genres such as street photography or within conceptualism and postmodernism, where it was typically made for the page of a book and embraced serial, sequential and archival strategies and practices. Picture for Women is a large colour photograph: Wall embraces the blatantly pictorial after the sparse anti-aestheticism of conceptual art. It is singular – Victor Burgin had doubted whether a single photograph could ‘sustain extended looking’ – without any text other than its puzzling but traditional title.

It was conceived as a tableau for museum exhibition, a distinct experience from that of viewing a photograph on the page. The tableau is a way of compensating for the difficulty a single photograph, as compared with a film, has in telling a story. It also acknowledges that photography is indubitably artistic, firmly in the tradition of and possessing the presence of museum painting;  Picture for Women  is self-consciously an art photograph, but we might still ask what an art photograph is or should do.

Campany is attentive to the photograph’s allusions and references – Wall’s work is typically art historical and allegorical – and contextualizes it theoretically and historically with regard to critiques of the medium of photography in media and film theory, feminism and postmodernism. Campany interprets the photograph in relation to Laura Mulvey’s analysis of film and spectatorship in her important essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975); Roland Barthes analysis of photographs and film stills was influential, especially his essay, ‘The Third Image’ (1970); Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’ – spaces that are either multiple or undefined  – is suggested as an interesting way of thinking about the photograph. Campany also references Michael Snow’s film Wavelength (1966-67) and Victor Burgin’s Zoo 78 (1978), concerned with the operation of power and desire. Wall described Picture for Women as ‘a kind of classroom on the mechanisms of the erotic’ and Campany comments that interpretations of the photograph must recognize that it depicts ‘gendered subjects and their relations’.

Campany explores key art historical influences and ‘reference images’ for Picture for Women. A central example is Manet’s painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere (1881) – Wall self-consciously places his photographs in an art historical relationship to Manet – and Charles Baudelaire’s 19th-century analysis of modern life in his essays such as ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Wall adopts the combination of tableau with reportage seen in Manet’s painting but partially suspends the documentary function of the photograph. His photography does describe the world but it is semi-fictional, a staged reconstruction of a ‘real’ situation. Although the difference is never absolute, we are led to the distinction between a photograph’s being ‘made’ and being ‘taken’. The photograph appears whole as if it were ‘taken’ but it self-consciously quotes from the history of art, suggesting it was ‘made’.

Fashion portraiture, in which models look directly at the viewer and yet possess a blank ‘indifference’ and ‘otherworldliness’, is another reference point, especially for the woman’s look into the camera in Wall’s photograph. Campany describes the difficulty of describing the meaning of the woman’s gaze. We know what is meant when it’s said someone in a photograph is looking at us, but we equally know that our and their gazes can never actually meet and Campany reminds us that there is a ‘profound unreality’ in the plainest, most direct image. Wall made use of the conventions of photographic portraiture in his earlier works, resulting in what Campany describes as inscrutable images that demand to be seen, but which, like the fashion portrait, are ultimately indifferent to us. Picture for Women depicts an enigmatic scenario addressed to and yet cut off from us; it is a ‘playoff between display and withdrawal’.

Picture for Women, likeCampany’s short book, does not encapsulate Wall’s oeuvre as a whole, but it expresses many of its earlier concerns and explores succinctly its different possible interpretations in the context of Wall’s earlier photography. The book is  most suitable for first-year undergraduate students of art and photography in the kinds of arguments and debates it raises. Campany assembles interpretations and contexts to indicate that the scene Wall constructed defies being easily pigeonholed. He follows Wall in not insisting upon a specific theory of what the medium of photography is, apart from accepting it ‘is perplexing and productive’. In a similar way, the book does not conclude with a final interpretation of Picture for Women, what the photograph definitely means.

Jeff Wall: Picture for Women  by David Campany is published by Afterall Books, 2011.  120 pp., 32 colour illus. ISBN 978-1-84638-071-6