Photography as Oral Tradition: Jeff Wall’s Narrative Tableaus

Newman, Michael
Jeff Wall: Works and Collected Writings
Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2007

About a year ago I found myself standing in front of one of Jeff Wall’s large format photos at a retrospective exhibit of his work at MOMA in NYC. I was entranced. With each photo a new question arose, or rather a multitude of questions. What was evidently simple with the first glance grew increasingly complex the longer I looked. I’ll give you an example. Storyteller is a picture of a bunch of people sitting on a grass embankment next to a highway overpass. They’re divided into three groups. One man sits alone right under the concrete bridge. Two women sit higher up where the bank verges on a thickly forested area at the periphery of the picture. Two men and a woman sit towards the front of the picture around an unlit camp fire. This woman is gesturing as if telling a story. “Okay” I said to myself upon first perusal, “I get it. The photographer has passed this group of people on the side of the highway and he snapped their picture. But wait a minute, why are they divided up into groups? Are those women about to go into the bushes or are they coming out of the bushes? Why do they look so secretive? And what is that guy doing all by himself over there? Hold on, something else looks a little strange. Even though this is shot outside in daylight in a rather mundane setting, there is a sense of theatricality here. Are these people posing for the camera? Did the photographer stage this?” Well, as it turns out, he did. This photograph is a tableau, a Jeff Wall production. As with many of his photos, Wall has created a scene. What appears to be photo journalism is in fact an original visualization, imagined or remembered, and realized as a work of art.

At Lincoln Center Institute we use the term “noticing deeply” to describe the process of looking at a work of art with heightened awareness, so that we may discover what we cannot see with just a cursory glance. Out of this experience we begin to construct meaning. Jeff Wall’s compelling tableau work engages the viewer in this process. It invites the double take. It provokes one to look and look again, to question and question again. Because the photographs are imbued with personal interpretation, a heightened sense of narrative reinforces the desire to explore further.

My take-away from the exhibit was recently reinvigorated by reading Jeff Wall: Works and Collected Writings by Michael Newman. This book is not a catalogue per se, but it does present dozens of high quality reproductions of Wall’s photos. I recognized many of them from the MOMA exhibit. Michael Newman, an art critic and scholar, examines these photos in five essays in which he considers the ideas of “tableau,” gesture as narrative communication, the landscape as natural history, photography as medium, and transparency and opacity. In linking these five essays, Newman presents a critical interpretation which suggests that Wall has considered many intellectual aspects in his work including art history, technique, art theory, and literature. This new perspective has greatly enriched my own understanding of his art.

Beside Newman’s essays, there are included in the book several written pieces by Wall himself, who is also a scholar of art history and theory. Among these works is an extremely dense writing called “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art.” Here Wall considers the special qualities and challenges of photography as a medium in modern and postmodern art. Notwithstanding some rather obscure vocabulary, this is an enlightening essay because it provides an explanation of Wall’s own struggles with the medium during the late 1960s and early 1970s. At this time, in search of its own “Conceptual” aesthetic, Wall explains that photography became “reductive” and “anesthetic.” In fact Wall left off making art for seven years and devoted his work to research and teaching before returning to photography in the late 1970s. It was at this juncture when he redirected his vision and created his photographs as tableaus. Newman’s writings on Wall’s art work are focused on the time when he returned to photography up to the present. In Newman’s words, “[Wall] subsequently came to reject Conceptual art’s use of photography as a means for communicating information in the form of deskilled documentation. Wall replaces the photograph as information which he associated with Conceptual art, with the photograph as the transmission of experience…” (page 174). It is this “experience” that we, as viewers, become involved in.

Let’s go back to Storyteller, the photo that intrigued me at Wall’s MOMA show. In Newman’s scholarly analysis, Wall’s device of tableau allows him to communicate on many levels and to reference his own substantial knowledge of art history. For instance, Newman compares Wall’s photograph to Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863) in their similar compositions and subject matter. He points out that Manet’s painting was a response to the new modernity in art, and that Wall, by referencing the painting, is expressing a consciousness of the old giving way to the new. In the subject matter of the photo, the new is represented by the modern landscape and the old is represented by the people who are resting in nature telling stories to one another. Yet this group of people seems fragmented. They are separated from one another, as I noticed when I saw the photo at the show. Some of them do not seem to be listening, are ignoring the storyteller on purpose, have distanced themselves from the narrative. In this regard, Newman cites the work of Walter Benjamin, a noted scholar from the early twentieth century who wrote an essay called “The Storyteller.” He paraphrases, “If the storyteller…” is becoming “something remote from us and is moving ever further away” – this means that the “ability to share experiences” has been taken away from us” (page 171). Newman posits that Wall is commenting on his own role as storyteller-photographer. So that he can tell a story which involves his audience, he needs to move closer to the story himself. Rather than being simply a reporter of information, a photo documenter, Wall stages or restages a passing moment thereby taking personal ownership of the story. In Newman’s words, “Similarly, Wall presents an image of story telling as a photograph that is, within a form of ‘mechanical reproduction’ which is part of the spectacular modernity that threatens to destroy the continuity of the oral tradition. In his own practice, Wall will transform this ‘destructive’ medium into the very condition of continuity” (page 176). As we, the audience, share Wall’s experience through his photographs and create our own meaning from that experience, a question comes to mind. How will we pass it on?

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