[strumming music]
Jeff Wall: I'm always searching for that picture.
That's what I do.
I'm always looking for that picture.
Some people call it subject.
I just call it a starting point.
It's the same thing.
Something comes up.
For example, right outside this building in 2001, I came out that door, and 3 or 4 people
carrying their packages and bags trundled by.
If I'd had a camera, I would have shot it,
but that's not how I do things,
so I knew that I needed to make a reconstruction of the event,
and I walked down two blocks to where the overpass is just here,
saw the sloping road and the sky, and I thought, "I'll do it there."
And I would have never even known I wanted to make it till I saw that thing happen, so
it's an accident.
The accident connects to me something I wasn't connected to before.
Could be seeing a picture like, for example,
when I did "The Sudden Gust of Wind" and I saw this Hokusai print in an art book.
It immediately suggested this could be done again.
You know, I have to wait for things to happen,
and once that occurs, then I have to make something.
Supposing somebody had a carton of milk and he just made the wrong gesture and it all
came splurting out.
That could easily happen.
Everyone's spilled milk, but I found a way to make it look much more fascinating than
an ordinary spillage.
[soft electronic strumming]
I've known the city since I was born.
I've lived here most of my life, and I think when you are from a place, you neither like
or hate it.
You know a lot.
You've been through a lot, so I have mixed feelings about Vancouver,
and I feel like when I'm working here I'm working out of those feelings…
and I can never really tell what's got the upper hand at any given moment.
And I'd like to think that somehow the pictures I've done have that in them.
♪ ♪
I still don't really know why I'm not a painter.
I stopped painting around 1964 when I was about 19 or 20,
the mid-sixties, that was just the beginning of really the explosion of all the kind of
new alternative kinds of art,
things like conceptual art, and for whatever reasons,
Vancouver was a very tuned in place at that time.
So I got deflected, you know,
away from being a painter with a studio,
which I had at the age of 15, to trying other things.
It seemed to me when I really got serious about photography that there was
potential energies inside of the medium that weren't really being realized.
That had to do with the scale of the picture,
and it seemed to me there was simply no technical reason
why photography couldn't become bigger.
[beeping of machine]
Photographs have a beautiful, molecular,
granular surface that both shows itself and hides itself in the image it makes,
so there are qualities thatare revealed in photography when it gets larger.
[Indistinct chatter]
After having seen some advertisements backlighted, I thought,
"OK.
I'll try "the backlighted.
"It's kind of interesting.
It has a kind of luminosity that's really different."
So then I just started using it, and it worked.
It created an object, and the object was sort of, you know, emphatic.
There's no real rules about–for me at least–
how I should proceed, so sometimes, I build replicas…
but when you start building a replica,
it can get really exciting and technically interesting and artistically very absorbing
to make that thing.
[Jeff Wall] Where are you looking?
— My hand, my thumb.
[Jeff Wall] Look at Andrew's face.
Now.
Yeah, that's it.
Just like that.
Oh, that's good.
Hold it.
Go.
Stop.
Go.
Stop.
Nothing in my pictures is fake.
Everything that you see happening is really happening.
— Action.
[Camera clicks, flash pops]
Good one.
[Camera clicks, flash pops]
Good.
There's really no difference between capturing a gesture by accident and capturing a gesture
by design,
so it's not really possible to have fakery in photography, not really.
♪ ♪
I don't think it's very easy to practice any art form very well,
so there's no reason why photography should be easy.
It's easy to click the shutter.
— But they're gonna do a whole run-through first.
So I need you guys on your marks just to double-check all the marks before we start.
[Jeff Wall] But bringing things together, however you do it,
is always difficult because the standards are high.
— You're standing in a way that doesn't make you look very tough.
— OK.
— Make yourself look like someone who's ready to do something bad.
—OK.
[Jeff Wall] I think working with performers, it's always very collaborative.
—Look it yourself if you want to see yourself up close.
[Jeff Wall] They always give me things that I didn't even know I wanted from them.
— Looks good out here.
— You look like a sculpture by Michelangelo right now.
[laughs]
— Which is great.
— Action.
[Camera clicks] Good.
Let's do another one.
Ready… action.
[Jeff Wall] I've learned that in order to do what I like to do I need to have an open-ended schedule.
It could take 5 days, could take 10 days, it could take 20 days.
I don't really know.
You can shoot hundreds of pictures of the same thing, and one of them's always different
from all the others.
It just is the way it goes,
and that picture discloses something that wasn't in the plan.
It was based on things I'd seen from the bringing of a person under the control of others to
a place,
and you see that all over the news.
That doesn't happen till discussion has come to an end, and so I added something.
He talks.
And the second thing that happens is the other one listens.
Neither of those things is likely to happen in that situation.
Talking is great in photography because it can't be captured.
It's the elusive element,
and that shows you the limits of the art form you're in.
I love that about it.
It always escapes.
[strumming acoustic music]
Pictures can never narrate.
They can only imply a narrative,
but they can never deliver it.
So what happens is when the viewer's having that experience what they're really doing
is writing the story.
They're intuiting a narrative for themselves,
which not be the same narrative for everybody.
Well, the title of that picture is "Daybreak on an Olive Farm in the Negev, Israel."
The picture included the Bedouin farm workers, the olive grove,
and one of the biggest prisons in Israel.
So it was a great subject of many things.
Some sleeping under the stars, who were probably poor,
and others sleeping in incarceration.
Who knows what they are,
and there could be thousands of them there.
Probably I identify with those kind of people in some way,
and I think I identify with all the people I photograph in some way.
So I think artistically a subject has no connection to the viewer unless the picture creates the
connection by its artistry,
by its beauty.
So let's say you come into the gallery and you see a picture of a homeless person
and you experience it in a way you hadn't experienced it before
because you hadn't seen it in that picture before.
Then you will know that the beauty of that picture was caused by that person somehow,
and as soon as you realize that that subject can cause that experience,
you've changed your own relation to that subject.
That's the social value of art, that it does that not by convincing you of anything,
telling you you should do this, but by giving you an experience or creating an experience
that itself,
yeah, alters something.
♪ ♪
The mainstream of my work has been a kind of realism because it's devoted to contemplating
photography as a phenomenon,
but I don't want to be obliged to a be a reporter all the time,
even a pseudo reporter.
Works of pictorial art have to be something that can be looked at endlessly.
Supposing it flashed into my mind this image of the ocean for no reason.
Like a daydream or a moment of imagination.
When you have flashes like that, they only last just an amazingly short time,
and they're gone, but you remember them.
They set off a photographic possibility.
For me, there's something called a picture
that is there all the time.
♪ ♪
I'm always searching for that picture, the next one.
♪ ♪
[soft electronic music]