Jeff Wall: Photographs

Publishers Weekly

A Canadian photographer justly celebrated over the last 30 or so years for his heightened, meticulous, pre-Photoshop photomontage tableaux, Wall won the prestigious Hasselblad award in 2002, one of the benefits of which is this gorgeous retrospective volume. The book eschews some of Wall's most famous, large-scale lightbox-enhanced productions for quieter yet deeply affecting works from every stage of his career, with an emphasis on more recent work, including Diagonal Composition No. 3 (2000), which takes its diagonals from a fetid mop and two worn spots on a linoleum floor, and Night (2001), in which one small, prone figure can barely be made out, lying with her back against a concrete wall, through a multitude of grays and blacks. Most spectacular is Wall's bringing to life of a scene from Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, where the narrator sits in a basement room, ceiling crammed with lit light bulbs, typing. With its sumptuous, full-page recto reproductions (with facing blank pages), the book gives Wall's work plenty of space to make itself felt and makes a good companion to a larger recent selection from Prestel. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

It's hard to know who the intended audience is for this attractively printed, slip-cased catalog. It documents a show organized by the Hasselblad Center (Gothenburg, Sweden) on the occasion of granting its 2002 International Award in Photography to Jeff Wall (b. 1946), a Canadian artist fascinated with using photography to explore what he termed, in an Artforum interview, "the everyday the most basic and the richest artistic category." The catalog isn't really suitable for newcomers to this artist, as it lacks a biography, exhibition history, and bibliography. It includes no photos showing the photographer's work in-site. (Wall uses backlit lightboxes to display his photos, but you wouldn't know that here.) The accompanying essay by critic Camiel van Winkel, editor of De Witte Raaf magazine, assumes an understanding of the artist's work that newcomers do not have. Neither does the catalog meet the needs of more advanced readers and for some of the same reasons: It doesn't offer supplementary material so useful to students and scholars and it doesn't show images that are not available elsewhere. A better choice would be Jeff Wall, the catalog for a major retrospective by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, edited by Kerry Brougher.-Michael Dashkin, PricewaterhouseCoopers, New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.