Mise En ScenePhotographer: Jeff Wall

Insomnia 1994

Jeff Wall and the Photograph as Contemporary Art

I chose this photograph because I was intrigued by the way that the scene had been set up to tell a story. Everything in this picture has been placed for a reason; nothing is accidental: everything has been thought out and purposely placed to construct a narrative.

Jeff Wall’s work falls under the area of practice that is often described as tableau or tableau-vivant photography, for pictorial narrative is concentrated into a single image. Tableau photography has its precedents in pre-photographic art and figurative painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centaury as we rely on recognising a combination of characters and props as a moment in a story. This style demonstrates an understanding of how a scene can be choreographed for the viewer so that he or she can recognise the story that’s being told.

Jeff Wall is one of the leading practitioners of staged tableau photography and his pieces of work are evidence of a detailed comprehension of how pictures work and are constructed. He describes his own work as being an ornate style in which the deception of the photograph is made obvious by the fantastic nature of his stories which often involved utilized digital manipulation. He creates staged events that appears like casually glanced at scenes.

Passerby, a black and white photograph initially proposes itself as night time reportage. Wall has set up a tension between the look of the two people caught in a photographic moment.

Insomnia

Insomnia is made with compositional methods similar to Renaissance painting, the angles, the objects of a kitchen scene directing us through the picture and developing our understanding of the narrative. The layout of the interior acts as a set of clues to the event that could have led to up to this moment. The man’s movements around the kitchen give the impression that he’s in a restless state and has resided to an uncomfortable position on the floor in desperation perhaps because of the lack of sleep. There’s a lack of homely details is a reflection of the characters lifestyle and his insomniac state. The scene has been stylized enough for us to suspect that this is choreographed to show an event/allegory of psychological distress. When constructing a scene like this, Jeff Wall is acting as a film director.

In galleries Wall displays most of his images on large light boxes because of their special and luminescent qualities which gives the photograph a spectacular presence. It is not quite a photograph or a painting but the light box suggests that it’s a mixture of the two. This brings in the reference of backlit and bill board advertisements even though it’s fundamentally different from the high impact advertisement of billboards.

Other examples of his work:

Inspired

Odradek, Taboritska 8, Prague, I

Biography

Canadian artist, Jeff Wall was born on 29th September 1946. He’s best known for his large- scale back lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing as well as being a key figure on the Vancouver art scene. His photographic tableaux often use a mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and post modern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

He received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970. He went on to do his post graduate work in London and became assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1974. Over the years he wrote and published many essays on other contemporary artists.

In his own work he experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate at University and didn’t make any art until 1977 when he produced his first back lit photo transparencies. Many of his images were not only staged but refers to art history and philosophical problems. His work also alludes to historical artists such as Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet.

His first gallery exhibition ‘Mimic’ was in 1978, an “installation” rather than as a photography show. Wall placed ‘The Destroyed Room’ in the storefront window of the Nova Gallery, enclosing it in a plasterboard wall. In Walls’ cinematographic style, a 198 x 226 cm, colour transparency, showed a white couple and an Asian man walking towards the camera. The woman is wearing red shorts and a white top displaying her midriff; her bearded, unkempt boyfriend wears a denim vest. The Asian man is casual but well-dressed in comparison, in a collared shirt and slacks. As

the couple over take the man, the boyfriend makes an ambiguous but apparently obscene and racist gesture, holding his upraised middle finger close to the corner of his eye, "slanting" his eye in mockery of the Asian man's eyes. This picture resembles a candid shot that captures the moment and its social tensions, but is actually a recreation of an exchange witnessed by the artist himself.

While Wall is known for large-scale photographs of contemporary everyday genre scenes populated with figures, in the early 1990s he became interested in still life’s.

His “cinematographic" pictures are produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects, such as A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993. Based on Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga (ca. 1832) a woodprint by Katsushika Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind recreates the depicted 19th century Japanese scene in contemporary British Columbia, utilizing actors and took over a year to produce 100 photographs in order "to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.

Since the early 1990s, he has used digital technology to create montages of different individual negatives, blending them into what appears as a single unified photograph. His signature works are large transparencies mounted on light boxes; he says he conceived this format when he saw back-lit advertisements at bus stops during a trip between Spain and London. In 1995, Wall began making traditional silver gelatin black and white photographs, and this has become an increasingly significant part of his practice since that time.

My Work

I started off wanting to use a photograph by Gregory Crewdson as I hadn’t really experimented with lighting before. However this proved to be a challenge and there were many difficulties when trying to film with lights outside. The first being that the battery pack I was given didn’t last very long when constantly lit and I would need many more lights to light up the scene in the way that Crewdson did, I feel that the shots didn’t represent his work like I wanted to. His work involved a huge budget for lights, sets and equipment and the spotlighting effect that appears in his photographs was very hard to achieve with the equipment that I had available. I also experimented with other forms of light such as candles and torches which were mainly used for the close up shots. I found that I really liked the close up shots lit in this situation at night as they have a really magical feel to them and the realism is taken away.

However I still went out and gave it a go as I wanted to see what I could achieve with the lighting and gain some experience. In the woods I took some photos and filmed before uploading it on to my computer to see how they came out. Even though they didn’t come out as I planned, I decided to change my photographer to Jeff wall. Both of these photographers fall under the category of tableau photography and use lights to enhance their work.

When I saw Jeff Walls’ Insomnia it reminded me of a kitchen that I’d seen before and so I also chose this as it was doable in the time that I had left after the minor setbacks that had occurred. As this scene was set at night, I knew I would need to continue using the lights from MPS. It took some time to set up the props and character as near to the details in my chosen image and I had to play around with the positioning of the light. I found that out of the three lights that I’d borrowed I only needed two and at other times one as it was only a small kitchen and the lighting was to strong.

Evaluation

As a final piece I feel that my short film piece is very representational of my chosen photograph, Insomnia. I tried to follow the props, character and positioning of the objects as closely as I could to the original staged piece. The idea was to try to film each object and party of the set like a photograph and to the same quality. I used my Nikon D90 to film for the HD quality to help intensify the depth of field in each shot and for colour quality. I used high quality sound effects for ambient sound and and a backing track/noise of a fuzzy TV as I felt that it fitted with the imagery. The sound is very irritating and unstable which I feel creates a more chaotic atmosphere to emphasise the chaotic situation of the mess in the kitchen and the characters psychological state.

Ideally I would have like more time to perfect this piece without any set backs. I found it quite hard to perfect the lighting in such a small location and ideally I needed a wide angle lens. The smallest lens I had was an 18- 105 mm but I didn’t quite have enough space to get a wider shot. When comparing it to the photograph I needed to be a bit further back with a slightly wider shot. However, I’m pleased with the outcome and in the future I will be more realistic with imagery that I chose and how doable it is in the time I have.