In this interview, Jeff Wall, a pivotal figure in contemporary photography, reflects on his shift from conceptual art, the nature of truth in images, and the quiet balance that defines his constructed scenes.
Born in Vancouver in 1946, Jeff Wall stands among the most authoritative voices in contemporary photography. Since the late 1970s, he has reshaped the idea of the photographic image, moving it away from pure documentation and into the realm of construction.
His large backlit transparencies, reminiscent of suspended cinema screens, stage ordinary moments that unfold as visual epiphanies. Every detail – light, gesture, environment – is carefully orchestrated, yet the result transcends fiction, offering a different kind of truth.
Balanced between painting and cinema, narrative and observation, Wall’s work redefines photography as a space for thought – where the image is not only what is seen, but what the viewer imagines having seen.
What made you move away from conceptual art in the 1970s and return to a more figurative, constructed image?
At first I was part of the radical experiments of the sixties and seventies, but I had started as a painter and always felt close to traditional art. Over time I realized that art and anti-art were not opposites – anti-art had simply become a new form of art: that understanding allowed me to reconnect with the figurative image, but from a completely new perspective.
Do you think photography can still tell the truth today?
(Silence) Yes.
How do you know when a picture is finished?
It’s sort of – well, I think that’s indefinable. I mean, if you’re doing this kind of work, you have to know, somehow. You need to know. How I know, I can’t really explain.
What I’m looking for is a combination of the composition I want to achieve – which, at some point, I feel I have some control over – and something else in the image that comes from what I can’t control, usually a living being: a person or an animal. Because that, I can never truly control, nor can anyone else.
So if I feel those two elements have come into a kind of balance, then I’ll probably look very carefully at that particular negative. If I make fifty negatives, or a hundred, or any number, there’s always one that’s different from all the others. That’s the one. And you have to know which one that is. When I see it, I usually just know.
What has changed most in the way you look at images over the years?
What has changed for me?
Yes, for you. In your career.
In a way, not very much. Because I think there are certain criteria – or maybe we can call them standards – of what we think of as a good picture. Even though we probably can’t list exactly what those qualities are, we recognize them when we see them. And that’s already a very old idea.
I think people who care about images have been thinking and reflecting on this for centuries, and I don’t know if it really changes that much. What changes, for me, are mainly technical things. The judgments I make now about my own pictures, or about other people’s pictures, are probably the same judgments I made when I was sixteen years old. So that’s been very stable.
But there have been a lot of technical changes that have made some things easier and others more difficult – and that’s what I tend to pay attention to. On the artistic level, I’d say there’s a kind of stability in the way I see things.
What would you tell a young artist about seeing?
Well, the first thing I’d say to any young artist is: pay very close attention to the artists you most admire, and study them carefully. It used to be called “studying the Old Masters,” you know. We don’t really use that phrase anymore, but we still need to be aware of which artists we can learn the most from by looking carefully at their work.
So, of course, the first thing an artist must look at is the world around them. But I think that kind of seeing is also informed by how the world looks when it has been transformed into an image.
And who did that? The artists who did that are the ones who accomplished things we need to understand. So yes, you have to look at the world – but you also have to look at the world through the knowledge, taste, and judgment you’ve gained from studying how it has been represented.
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- A conversation with the photographer Jeff Wall - November 21, 2025
