The Easel

12th March 2024

Stranger than fiction: Discover five striking photographs by Jeff Wall

Wall loves a puzzle. Exploiting the documentary-like quality of photography, he creates images of sometimes elaborately staged scenes. His approach repudiates photography’s origins as a recorder of events, instead placing the medium closer to cinematography. The payoff is that his photography gains a freedom that art forms like painting take for granted. Wall can blend memory and imagination as he wishes, creating not a fact but “a resemblance to a feeling about a fact”.