Jeff Wall- Man with a Rifle Interview at MUMOK Vienna, by Liliane-Sarah Kölbl and Julia Várkonyi 2010 …
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 By Paul Graham This month I read a review in a leading US Art Magazine of a Jeff Wall survey book, praising how he had distinguished himself from previous art photography by: “Carefully constructing his pictures as provocative often open ended vignettes, instead of just snapping his surroundings” Anyone who cares about photography‘s unique and astonishing qualities as a medium should be insulted by such remarks, especially here, now, in 2010, … …n natural. Oppenheim signals this with the book, entitled Tactics, he chose to shield his chest. In his essay on photography for the 1995 Conceptualism exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, photographer Jeff Wall takes the position of a critic. He states that Conceptualism did, in fact, explore the medium specificity of photography and that the movement contributed to the acceptance of photography as fine art. He asserts: &… “The Photographic Idea: Reconsidering Conceptual Photography” (1999) …ore wisely. 1 In the past several years, some curators and art historians, such as Michael Fried, have devoted much attention to photography. However, they tend to be most enamored of—or at least interested in—artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, who are known for their elaborately constructed or digitally manipulated photographs and who have therefore seceded, I would argue, from the traditional definition of photography, if not actuall… THEORY: “The Treacherous Medium: Why Photography Critics Hate Photographs”  …enting is extremely dull and journalism…I’m a very bad reporter and a photojournalist. Capa told me when I had an exhibition at the museum of Modern Art in ’46, he said no, he’d be very careful. You mustn’t have a label of a surrealist photographer. All my training was surrealism. I still feel very close to a surrealist but he said if you were labelled as a surrealist photographer you won’t go any further you won’t have an assignment … HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: “Words by Henri Cartier-Bresson” (1973)  …. It just simply means that I am able to think better. Let’s put it that way. AC: I read that you don’t really consider yourself an environmental portrait photographer, is that true? AN: No, I think basically I am. But I hate labels. That label was placed on me by an early writer who did an article on me calling me the father of the environmental portrait, which seems to have stuck. But the Stravinsky is not an environmental portrait, it’s really…  …0;put these parts together and do a close-up.” I was more interested in using the sexuality of loaded images to say something even greater than that sexuality. One wall that was great to smash into and bounce off of was Jeff Koons’s pictures of himself and Cicciolina, which were, of course, his way of trying to be sensationalistic. I wanted to make something terrifying in response to that. I usually don’t even like to bring up h… INTERVIEW: “Interview with Artist Cindy Sherman – A Woman of Parts” (1997)  …till then excluded from what was largely a painter’s academy. Many of his students have been extremely successful: Candida Hofer, Thomas Struth, Jorg Sasse and, most notably, Andreas Gursky. When Becher retired in 1996, Jeff Wall was chosen to succeed him, but when Wall came to meet the class for the first time, he was confronted by a former Becher student holding a loaded gun. Wall resigned immediately. Bernd Becher was enraged by the acad…  …mplicated ones which can get lost. The running order of a number of projects I’ve done is virtually narrative: you start here and you end here and certain things happen in between. LB: But it’s never one incident. Not like in Jeff Wall where there’s a definite narrative incident. JG: No. LB: An incident which is sometimes brilliant, actually probably more often than not. But it’s a narrative incident and you can construct a fantasy over one parti… INTERVIEW: “A Conversation Between Lewiz Baltz and John Gossage” (2010) | ||||||||||||||
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