Jeff Wall Biography

Jeff Wall’s large-scale, back-lit cibachrome photographic tableaux take a mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Some of Wall's photographs are complicated productions involving cast, sets, crews and digital postproduction. They have been characterised as one-frame cinematic productions. Wall distinguishes between unstaged 'documentary' pictures and 'cinematographic' pictures, produced using a combination of actors, sets, and special effects. 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. Since the mid-1990s, Wall has also made large scale black and white photographs, some of which were exhibited at Kassel's Documenta X, as well as smaller colour prints.

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, Canada where he lives and works. He has exhibited widely, with retrospectives at Schaulager, Basel Tate Modern, London in 2005, and MoMA, New York, the Chicago Art Institure and SFMoMA, San Francisco in 2007.