Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian photographer. He is artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Jeff Wall at Paris Photo 2014
Mimic (1982)
Picture for Women (1979). Art critic Jed Perl describes Picture for Women as Wall's signature piece.
Un bar aux Folies Bergère by Édouard Manet, completed in 1882
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s. Critics and curators began writing about artists reacting to both older conceptual art practices and mass media by countering with "photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery." No formal "school" exists and the grouping remains both informal and often controversial even amongst the artists themselves, who often resist the term. Artists associated with the term include Vikky Alexander, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham.
Mimic (1982)
Win, Place or Show (1998) installation view