JEFF WALL: LIFE IN PICTURES

White Cube is pleased to present “Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures”.

November 22, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Comprising over 40 works, the exhibition documents Wall’s artistic development and pioneering career, tracing the complexity and exactitude of his pictures – from the earlier lightbox transparencies to his more recent black-and-white photographs and colour prints.

Residing between near-documentary realism and compositional artifice, Wall’s photographs draw the viewer into a world of incidental detail, rich with specificity and narrative potential. Spanning from the early 1980s to the present, Wall’s work offers a honed, singular gaze towards the subtleties of modern life – the brief exchanges, daily rituals, aberrations and chance occurrences that inform the everyday. Wall has established himself as one of the foremost proponents of sustained observation and an innovator in photography’s unique capacity for poetic representation.

Having worked exclusively in colour transparencies until the mid-1990s, Wall then began producing black-and-white silver gelatin prints. He had never wanted to be limited to a single photographic format, and this broadening of his repertoire had been planned for some years. He considers the dramatic, striking absence of colour to be the defining characteristic of black-and-white photography and its active presence in his work has been a way for him to bring more attention to the breadth and complexity of the medium – its way of making colour both appear and disappear. A part of this is his attention to the peculiar luminosity of monochrome photographs, an effect apparent in A woman with a necklace (2021), where the veiled glow of sunlight through a curtained window imparts an almost preternatural radiance to the beads of the necklace held aloft by the reclining woman. ‘Some subjects require the absence of colour’, Wall observes. ‘That lack, that absence, also creates a disturbance in how you perceive. I think that disturbance does something that the pictures, when they’re successful, do – which is to be almost more lifelike than life itself.’

Wall refers to his photographic methodology as ‘cinematographic’, a term he uses to convey the freedom of approach and artistic license of cinema – its tendency to distil the essence of an experience, while being liberated from the verisimilitude of the original circumstances.