Moving stills: Jeff Wall on the art of his photography, currently on show in Hong Kong
The Canadian artist calls his work ‘cinematography’ even though he only ever creates still images of subjects and stories that he is reluctant to interpret
Sometimes, it pays to be anachronistic.
In 2012, a work by Jeff Wall was sold for US$3.6 million, making it the third most expensive photo ever sold at auction. Few people work like the 69-year-old Canadian artist any more. He still uses film, though not exclusively; still shoots with a large-format camera, and has never been tempted to make moving images at a time when every smartphone doubles as a movie camera. A man who describes his own work as cinematographic has stuck with stills.
“I call my works cinematography because I’ve always admired how cinematographers do their photography. I thought that’s how I’d like to work. Not because I want to make films,” he says at the launch of his first solo exhibition in Asia.
“I love pictures. I always have. I like their stillness, which is so open and free. I like the fact that they don’t have to complete a story.”
Dead Troops Talk (A Vision After an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, Near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), the photograph that was auctioned in 2012, is one of his incomplete stories.
