Jeff Wall
“Photography seemed to prove that there was only one world, not many – one visible world anyway. But I think that is only a suggestion made by photography, not a conclusion. And the suggestion can be taken in so many different ways.”
- Jeff Wall,. Photographs, 2002.
Critical reviews of Jeff Wall's work, both positive and negative, have stressed the “total control” that he possessed over his images. An argument for being sympathetic to the total-control approach stresses that the camera does not merely register the world as is, but that it registers its own impact on the world as a consequence of being what it is, a witness. Some critics have even claimed that the dramatic expansion of the capabilities of digital technologies has even given rise to a “new kind of hyper-figurative, magical-realist-type painting.”
