Yet Another Post About Jeff Wall, This One Involving Joerg Colberg

Jeff Wall, Men waiting, 2006. Copyright Jeff Wall.

Writing the other day about Jeff Wall's MOMA show, Joerg Colberg, on Conscientious, had this to say about contrivance in photography:

"Time and again I've come across someone saying that there was something wrong if a photographer was spending a lot of time and effort on a single, staged photo. . . . I don't know what it is that bothers me about this kind of criticism, but for me I feel very uncomfortable about it. . . . Why is it wrong to elaborately stage photos, especially if the goal is to create a piece of art that references or follows tradition? . . . How is hiring twenty people and making them wait in some location until the light is right bad? And how would it be different from waiting for days in a spot to take some landscape photo? Why leave the staging of sets and scenes to the people with movie cameras? Is it the belief that photography is somehow more "real" or "authentic" when it's just a snapshot?"

Good questions. If Colberg's point is that there are no valid a priori objections to forms or modes of art, I would agree. Good art works. Bad art doesn't. Of course, this approach leaves lots of room for individual opinion. Eventually, though, a critical consensus will form. We may still be too close to the photography of which he speaks to have such perspective.

Nevertheless, reading the Times Magazine article on Wall, I was struck by the artist's own - perhaps unconscious - ambivalence about his work. For example, instead of hiring actors to play the role of the workers in "Men Waiting," above, he went to an actual corner where such men congregate and hired 20 of them to stand around at a site more to his liking. For a work entitled "In front of a nightclub," he recreated the scene in his studio, complete with dirt and moss in the cracks of the foundation, details that could not be seen in the finished photograph. And "The Flooded Grave" was populated with not just any sea creatures, but ones selected by marine biologists from a single offshore spot.

Why? "I wanted to make it as real as I could," said Wall. But, if there is nothing troubling about contrivance, why bother? Who would know the fish were inauthentic? Who would care? After all, they're swimming in a grave.