Photographs

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Trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working for over 25 years on his expansive light boxes of staged scenes. These backlit photographic transparencies are set in cases generally associated with advertising display; but, instead of advertisements, Wall fills them with moments of everyday life that usually go unacknowledged: workers restoring a historic building, a janitor mopping a floor, a kitchen flooded with sunlight, the side of a house in the prairies. Carefully staged and meticulously composed, often over and over again until the perfect image has been achieved, Wall's images have explored a wide range of social and political themes, including urban violence, racism, poverty, gender and class conflicts, history, memory, and representation. Like the great French realist painters of the 19th century, Wall is, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, "a painter of modern life."