WEBVTT

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[strumming music]

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Jeff Wall: I'm always searching for that picture.

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That's what I do.

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I'm always looking for that picture.

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Some people call it subject.

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I just call it a starting point.

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It's the same thing.

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Something comes up.

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For example, right outside this building in
2001, I came out that door, and 3 or 4 people

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carrying their packages and bags trundled by.

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If I'd had a camera, I would have shot it,

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but that's not how I do things,

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so I knew that I needed to make a reconstruction
of the event,

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and I walked down two blocks to where the
overpass is just here,

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saw the sloping road and the sky, and I thought,
"I'll do it there."

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And I would have never even known I wanted
to make it till I saw that thing happen, so

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it's an accident.

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The accident connects to me something I wasn't
connected to before.

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Could be seeing a picture like, for example,

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when I did "The Sudden Gust of Wind" and I
saw this Hokusai print in an art book.

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It immediately suggested this could be done
again.

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You know, I have to wait for things to happen,

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and once that occurs, then I have to make
something.

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Supposing somebody had a carton of milk and
he just made the wrong gesture and it all

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came splurting out.

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That could easily happen.

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Everyone's spilled milk, but I found a way
to make it look much more fascinating than

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an ordinary spillage.

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[soft electronic strumming]

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I've known the city since I was born.

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I've lived here most of my life, and I think
when you are from a place, you neither like

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or hate it.

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You know a lot.

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You've been through a lot, so I have mixed
feelings about Vancouver,

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and I feel like when I'm working here I'm
working out of those feelings…

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and I can never really tell what's got the
upper hand at any given moment.

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And I'd like to think that somehow the pictures
I've done have that in them.

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♪ ♪

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I still don't really know why I'm not a painter.

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I stopped painting around 1964 when I was
about 19 or 20,

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the mid-sixties, that was just the beginning
of really the explosion of all the kind of

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new alternative kinds of art,

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things like conceptual art, and for whatever
reasons,

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Vancouver was a very tuned in place at that
time.

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So I got deflected, you know,

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away from being a painter with a studio,

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which I had at the age of 15, to trying other
things.

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It seemed to me when I really got serious
about photography that there was

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potential energies inside of the medium that
weren't really being realized.

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That had to do with the scale of the picture,

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and it seemed to me there was simply 
no technical reason

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why photography couldn't become bigger.

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[beeping of machine]

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Photographs have a beautiful, molecular,

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granular surface that both shows itself and
hides itself in the image it makes,

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so there are qualities thatare revealed in
photography when it gets larger.

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[Indistinct chatter]

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After having seen some advertisements backlighted,
I thought,

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"OK.

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I'll try "the backlighted.

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"It's kind of interesting.

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It has a kind of luminosity that's really
different."

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So then I just started using it, and it worked.

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It created an object, and the object was sort
of, you know, emphatic.

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There's no real rules about–for me at least–

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how I should proceed, so sometimes, I build
replicas…

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but when you start building a replica,

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it can get really exciting and technically
interesting and artistically very absorbing

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to make that thing.

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[Jeff Wall] Where are you looking?

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— My hand, my thumb.

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[Jeff Wall] Look at Andrew's face.

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Now.

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Yeah, that's it.

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Just like that.

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Oh, that's good.

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Hold it.

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Go.

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Stop.

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Go.

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Stop.

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Nothing in my pictures is fake.

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Everything that you see happening is really
happening.

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— Action.

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[Camera clicks, flash pops]

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Good one.

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[Camera clicks, flash pops]

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Good.

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There's really no difference between capturing
a gesture by accident and capturing a gesture

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by design,

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so it's not really possible to have fakery
in photography, not really.

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♪ ♪

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I don't think it's very easy to practice any
art form very well,

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so there's no reason why photography should
be easy.

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It's easy to click the shutter.

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— But they're gonna do a whole run-through first.

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So I need you guys on your marks just to
double-check all the marks before we start.

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[Jeff Wall] But bringing things together, however you
do it,

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is always difficult because the standards
are high.

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— You're standing in a way that doesn't
make you look very tough.

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— OK.

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— Make yourself look like someone who's ready
to do something bad.

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—OK.

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[Jeff Wall] I think working with performers, it's always
very collaborative.

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—Look it yourself if you want to see yourself
up close.

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[Jeff Wall] They always give me things that I didn't even
know I wanted from them.

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— Looks good out here.

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— You look like a sculpture by Michelangelo
right now.

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[laughs]

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— Which is great.

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— Action.

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[Camera clicks] Good.

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Let's do another one.

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Ready… action.

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[Jeff Wall] I've learned that in order to do what I like
to do I need to have an open-ended schedule.

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It could take 5 days, could take 10 days,
it could take 20 days.

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I don't really know.

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You can shoot hundreds of pictures of the
same thing, and one of them's always different

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from all the others.

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It just is the way it goes,

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and that picture discloses something that
wasn't in the plan.

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It was based on things I'd seen from the bringing
of a person under the control of others to

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a place,

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and you see that all over the news.

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That doesn't happen till discussion has come
to an end, and so I added something.

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He talks.

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And the second thing that happens is the other
one listens.

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Neither of those things is likely to happen
in that situation.

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Talking is great in photography because it
can't be captured.

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It's the elusive element,

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and that shows you the limits of the art form
you're in.

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I love that about it.

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It always escapes.

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[strumming acoustic music]

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Pictures can never narrate.

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They can only imply a narrative,

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but they can never deliver it.

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So what happens is when the viewer's having
that experience what they're really doing

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is writing the story.

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They're intuiting a narrative for themselves,

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which not be the same narrative for everybody.

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Well, the title of that picture is "Daybreak
on an Olive Farm in the Negev, Israel."

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The picture included the Bedouin farm workers,
the olive grove,

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and one of the biggest prisons in Israel.

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So it was a great subject of many things.

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Some sleeping under the stars, who were probably
poor,

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and others sleeping in incarceration.

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Who knows what they are,

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and there could be thousands of them there.

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Probably I identify with those kind of people
in some way,

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and I think I identify with all the people
I photograph in some way.

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So I think artistically a subject has no connection
to the viewer unless the picture creates the

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connection by its artistry,

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by its beauty.

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So let's say you come into the gallery and
you see a picture of a homeless person

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and you experience it in a way you hadn't
experienced it before

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because you hadn't seen it in that picture
before.

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Then you will know that the beauty of that
picture was caused by that person somehow,

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and as soon as you realize that that subject
can cause that experience,

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you've changed your own relation to that subject.

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That's the social value of art, that it does
that not by convincing you of anything,

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telling you you should do this, but by giving
you an experience or creating an experience

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that itself,

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yeah, alters something.

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♪ ♪

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The mainstream of my work has been a kind
of realism because it's devoted to contemplating

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photography as a phenomenon,

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but I don't want to be obliged to a be a reporter
all the time,

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even a pseudo reporter.

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Works of pictorial art have to be something
that can be looked at endlessly.

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Supposing it flashed into my mind this image
of the ocean for no reason.

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Like a daydream or a moment of imagination.

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When you have flashes like that, they only
last just an amazingly short time,

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and they're gone, but you remember them.

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They set off a photographic possibility.

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For me, there's something
called a picture

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that is there all the time.

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♪ ♪

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I'm always searching for that
picture, the next one.

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♪ ♪

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[soft electronic music]