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Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Picture for Women

by David Campany
Publication Date: 08/04/2011

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Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. Before this, photographs--from the orthodox photographic work of Walker Evans to the Conceptual photography of Dan Graham--seemed intended for the page even when hung in a gallery. In Picture for Women, a woman looks outward, as if at the viewer; a camera occupies the center of the photograph; the photographer stands on the right. Modeled on Manet's famous painting Un bar aux Folies-Bergere, in which a barmaid seems to look directly out of the painting, observed by a man on the right, Picture for Women establishes its own art historical genealogy, claiming its rightful position within the canon. Wall's photograph is an ambitious attempt to relate the artistic and spectatorial demands of the late 1970s to a modernist pictorial art that had been too hastily rejected by Conceptualism. In this illustrated study, David Campany offers an account of Wall's move from a Conceptual approach to a reengagement with the idea of a singular (as opposed to serial) picture.
He shows that Wall's decision to present his work as a large-scale back-lit transparency, together with his commitment to a singular image, amounted to a radical departure. He contrasts Wall's idea of the photograph as a tableau or "picture," inherited from the history of painting, with the works of the "Pictures Generation"--including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Jack Goldstein--and argues that Picture for Women is inseparable from the modern fate of the picture in general
ISBN:
9781846380716
9781846380716
Category:
Individual photographers
Publication Date:
08-04-2011
Publisher:
Afterall Publishing
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
118
Dimensions (mm):
216x152x17mm
Weight:
0.32kg
David Campany

David Campany is a writer, curator and artist, working mainly with photography. He's author of A Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (2014), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014), Gasoline (2013), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (2010), Photography and Cinema (2008) and Art and Photography (2003).

He has written over two hundred essays for museums and monographic books, and contributes to Frieze, Aperture, Source and Tate magazine. For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society's award for writing. Currently he teaches at the University of Westminster, London.

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