Jeff Wall in "Vancouver" - Season 8 | Art21

[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]