Jeff Wall and Cibachrome Photography | Essay

Running Head: Jeff Wall and Cibachrome Photography
Jeff Wall and Cibachrome Photography
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

JEFF WALL AND CIBACHROME PHOTOGRAPHY
1
JEFF WALL AND CIBACHROME PHOTOGRAPHY
Jeffrey Wall, or better known as Jeff Wall, is among the modern artists of Canada and
one of the few among the artists to introduce postmodern philosophy in their work of art. Jeff
has been involved in artwork since his undergraduate days at the University of British
Columbia (UBC), after which he stopped making art and joined Courtauld Institute to
complete his postgraduate. He studied Edouard Manet under Clark, which reflects in his later
work showing postmodern life using everyday material things to depict his impressions. The
paper will trace the evolution and change in the learning process and the social actors who
were responsible for Wall’s rise to prominence.
In London, he served under many universities as associate professor and lecturer. The
reason for his break from art was revealed by him in one of his interviews to be reassessing
and evaluating his approach towards following the deviation in the avant-garde movement
and adhering to the neo avant-garde techniques (Conley, 2019). His assessment of himself
was that of dissatisfaction, and he stayed in the teaching profession. It made him learn about
the same techniques, which helped him learn about it more, and he considers it to be one of
the pivotal moments in his life, which made him realize the difference in the creation he
could produce.
Jeff rose to prominence due to his take on photography as a medium to engage in his
art with the help of backlit phototransparencies when he returned with his work in the year
1977 (Ackerley, 2014). These works were taken as renunciation from the norms of depicting
painting in the form of conventional display and showed the representation of the social
issues. His pictures tend to share a similar trait, but he denies the fact that he makes any of
them as a continuation of the first. They show affinity towards novels and writings for their
depiction of an image in the form of a detailed analysis of picture and the thought process of
an artist’s mind rather than a depiction of a memory. His photography blended the general

JEFF WALL AND CIBACHROME PHOTOGRAPHY
2
flow of narrative in the works of impressionist writings as well as to artists such as Franz
Kafka and Edouard Manet.
During the period of the 1960’s the artists’ front was reeling with the continuation of
the Avant-Garde movement of impressionism and Dadaism and Jeff due to his academic life
falling in this period ended up reading and learning about them but was later on unsatisfied
with his conventional following of the norms. When the artists and his contemporaries were
falling for the contemporary inventions in the printers and following the norm of deviation,
he went back to the adoption of the backlit transphotography, which was adhering to the
convention. It showed his negation of following the convention of modernism by violating
the Avant-Garde method and working on the landscape of Vancouver in his early works to
show his impression of the social art of theatre and literature (Modigliani, 2010). His utility
of the Cibachrome photographs with the use of backlit boxes, which were primarily used in
billboards and the organization of his exhibitions as shows, reflects the narrative form his
pictography showed.
Jeff was considerably affected by the post-medium effect generated from the relation
of Greenberg and Adorno, who showed the effect of deviation of modernism from the
convention and the adherence to the postmodern technological advancement. Adorno’s
writings suggest that modernism, as the aesthetic form, was never an independent entity
rather largely depended on the mass culture, which was the product of the technological use
in photography. However, his writings also showed the inherent culture which was present in
the modern photographic front was the amalgamation of the effort to include the impact of
the destruction of the war and later the holocaust (Wall, 2012). The discourse showed the rise
and disintegration of the formalist art form and the artists looking to experiment with their art
outside the formal lesion, which was the re-emergence of the convention of deviation from