Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

Jeff Wall @ Marian Goodman, NYC (2)

As a critic, I try to approach each project (a book, a show) as an entity in itself, to gauge whatever satisfactions it affords and dissatisfactions it provokes, and only then to add it to the larger oeuvre in order to weigh it in relation to the whole. The question of expectations re quantity of output depends very much on the mode within which the photographer works and the processes of production within that mode. […]

Jeff Wall @ Marian Goodman, NYC (1)

I’m perplexed by the claim to cinematographic concern on Wall’s part, because I don’t know of any cinematographer who uses, or would approve the use of by others, a visual strategy that invariably places the subject front and center in the frame, with no significant use of the edge of the frame, no selective depth of field, no activation of the foreground, no foreground-background relationships . . . it’s a banal and tedious POV, one of the first habits they get you to break in film school. Even the purists at [the Danish film collective] Dogme 95 gave themselves more latitude. […]