Jeff wall is a Canadian artist and photographer. His photographic work capture movement and tension. Many of these are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. His work's compositions often pay homage to other artists (E.g. Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison). He presents his photography work as installations as opposed to photography shows/ exhibitions - I believe that he does this as he wants people to be involved in his work
Whilst his work is technically easy to create, artistically his photography and film work are challenging as it requires capturing the 'right moment' among movement.
One photo that really draws me to Jeff Wall's work is his piece "After Invisible Man" (See below). This photograph's stimuli was the prologue in the book "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. Jeff Wall took the design of the room seen in his piece from the description of the character's room. He has said that designing the room took a lot longer to create than actually building the set for the shoot.
In our society, it is not unusual for someone who is black to experience the feeling that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to slay. It is through this idea that the work gets it's undeniable tension.
Due to time and expense I am unable to recreate or invent sets on this scale myself I will film shots of myself in front of a green screen and place myself into Jeff Wall's work. My intentions on doing this is to make the tension come alive even more through subtle movement. In addition to adding myself to 'After Invisible Man', I plan on adding myself into his other works 'Milk', 'a sudden gust of wind', and more.
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