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Jeff Wall: picture for women

Jeff Wall’s photograph 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. Wall’s photograph is an ambitious attempt to relate the artistic and spectatorial demands of the late 1970s to a modernist pictorial art too hastily rejected by Conceptualism. 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 Sherrie Levine, as well as the psycho-sexual image-text works of Victor Burgin. He argues that Picture for Women is inseparable from the modern fate of the picture in general. Drawing upon a wide range of critical discourses – from feminist film theory, Post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis to ontological debates about the photographic image, modernist aesthetics and theories of allegory – Campany’s book is unusual in offering sustained analysis of a single photograph. The book forms part of Campany’s wider research into Wall’s work, which includes the book ‘Jeff Wall speaks with David Campany’ (La Fabrica, Madrid, 2010); Jeff Wall & Patrick Faigenbaum in PA magazine No.1 (PA is co-founded and edited by Campany, Zurich, 2008); ‘Traces and Pictures’ in Through the Looking Brain (Kunstmuseum, Bonn, 2011). Won New York ICP Infinity Award for Writing, 2012.