Jeff Wall’s work often captures moments that appear spontaneous, but are actually are highly constructed – sometimes from events witnessed by the artist that are later distilled and moulded into a new heightened reality, frozen in time; elevated and transformed.

Reshaping the relationship between the viewer and his photographs, Wall maintains the only way to really see the pieces is at the intended size (often large and wall-mounted), his early interest in art history informing a presentation style that had more often been associated with painting. To mark a 30-year relationship between White Cube and this visionary image-maker, the gallery will present both old and new work in its Bermondsey site from November until January next year.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I was interested to read you were always drawing and painting as a child. When you were fourteen, your father gave you a little building on the back of your parents’ property – so as a teenager you already had your own studio, which is very unusual. What brought you to art, what were your early inspirations?
Jeff Wall: My parents were typical people of the 50s, my father was a doctor, we had
a very conventional family. But they were very liberal and were interested in culture, they did things like subscribe to the Book of the Month Club – which was famous in the 50s and 60s – where people would receive a book of some significance every month, whether it was a novel, or historical work or whatever. They also subscribed to publications that sent, every month, a picture book about a great artist. So I was already seeing these by the age of ten or eleven. One month it would be Rembrandt, the next it could be Bruegel, the next Michelangelo and so on. So that kind of art was in our house from the time I was a small boy. I loved it, and I took to it very strongly, I was always drawing as a kid. In fact, last week I was looking through some portfolios in my house and I found some paintings I did at about the age of nine, it was nice to see them – my mother must have saved them over all these years, and my wife got them from her. Looking at them, I thought I could remember the kind of kid I was at that time. My bedroom was so full of stuff – my drawing table and all that – and we had a very small tool shed behind our house that was big enough for a little studio, so my father gave it to me when I must have been around thirteen or fourteen. I did all of my drawings and paintings in there for several years until I left home. So I had a very advantageous childhood in that way, because of my parents’ attitudes and the things they did for me.

HUO: Then as a teenager you started to go from a studio practice to a post-studio practice, as you explain in the [Fondation] Beyeler catalogue [Wall had a show at Beyeler in early 2024]. When I was a student, I came to New York in the late 80s, early 90s, and the first person I met was Vito Acconci. He showed me his library of artists’ books under the Brooklyn Bridge, and sent me to different bookstores, like Printed Matter. I found Landscape Manual [1969–70], this sort of newspaper artist’s book, that’s how I saw your work for the first time. You were very young when you made that. I read that you were not only inspired by conceptual art but also by experimental film practice. Czesław Miłosz – the poet Nobel Laureate from Kraków – told me that everybody who worked from the second half of the 20th century onwards was, in one way or the other, influenced by cinema, whether you’re a poet, a painter or a photographer. Could you talk about this artist’s book, and about your shifting from a studio practice to a post-studio practice. Also, the connection with experimental film – and also, what brought you to London in 1970?
JW: I never met any artists when I was young because I lived in Vancouver, which was a rather small and faraway place. Although, interestingly enough, in Vancouver in the
early 60s, my high school had a very serious art programme, something else that helped
me a lot. They subscribed to all the current art magazines, like Art in America and Art International, so as a young teenager, about the age of fifteen, I learned a lot about what was going on. After about seven or eight years of being involved in drawing, painting and collaging – that leads us to about 1965 or 66 – that’s when photography began to emerge
as something fascinating that could distract me from what I was doing, and I guess I let myself be distracted by it. I was young, so I was interested in ‘the latest thing’ – I took
up photography in the atmosphere of early conceptual art, and that would take us into
the second half of the 60s. I began to look carefully at the artists I liked at that time, including people like Robert Smithson, who had done some very interesting articles for Art Form in the late 60s. They struck me as having a literary dimension that also included an experimental relationship to the image and the artwork. Combining conceptual art, which I was interested in, with literature, which I’ve also always been interested in, I experimented to find a way to combine a literary dimension with a questioning of the artwork and, for that moment, a sort of innovative use of photography. I wanted to integrate a way of using photography differently, with a writing practice – an experimental form of art that, in this case took the form of that little publication [Landscape Manual]. It was a one-off and I didn’t like it, I abandoned that direction almost immediately afterwards, but it did sum up some of the experiments I was doing at that time.

This was when I still had a studio, not the one I mentioned earlier, but a different one, and I was doing other experimental things, so it came out of the context of the mid- to late-60s. Around the same time, the early 70s, a friend of mine, Dennis Wheeler, was curating for museums in Vancouver, and he made an exhibition called Form and Structure in Recent Film. He brought in Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton… all these filmmakers of that era. I was quite close to him and interested in that kind of filmmaking, so that had an influence because of its innovative form and the ability of the film to occupy a different sort of space – the films then were not necessarily shown in cinemas, they could be shown in empty rooms, or wherever, and that aspect was pretty important too. One of the things I learned from paying attention to the cinema, and this went into the 70s, was that in preparing a scenario for any sort of film one is essentially writing images. One is writing at least the presupposition – or the precursor – to an image that will be made later. That presence of writing in the process of making an image stayed with me after I lost interest in cinema itself. So that’s the gist of it. I went to London because I got a scholarship to The Courtauld Institute and I had studied art history, and wanted to get out of Vancouver. My wife Jeannette, who is English, and I, decided if I could get a scholarship I would go and do graduate studies in London. Not so much to do graduate studies, but to get out of Vancouver and live in a bigger city, which we did for several years.

HUO: Landscape Manual was still made in Vancouver in 69, could you talk a bit more about it?
JW: It was a combination of things I was interested in; at the time, I was also very taken by André Breton’s novel Nadja [1928], which was translated and republished in the 60s in English. I could read French badly, but I had the English version – and I was fascinated by the presence of photographs in that text. That, combined with the way Robert Smithson used documentary photographs to illustrate his own subjective writing in things like The Monuments of Passaic [1967]. Breton had done the same thing, and it somehow connected to the whole ethos of surrealism and a radicality about
what an artwork should be, and what it could accomplish. I used these energies and wrote this text, which I can’t even really remember very clearly, but I wrote that particular text because I needed to write something in order to carry out this project, of making this final form, this booklet with photographs. I wanted it to be an illustrated text having both objective and subjective qualities, so I just did it. I managed to get it published very cheaply in 1969 and sold it for 25 cents, and sold probably a few dozen…

HUO: By the time I had bought it in the late 80s it was probably 5 dollars, but it was still affordable!
JW: It’s a bit vintage now – I don’t know if it’s worth much.

HUO: You have been working on the second volume of your catalogue raisonné, and it’s always interesting to think about which artwork is number one – when does student work end and where does an artist begin? Gerhard Richter famously eliminated all the work until Table [1962], his first photo painting – that’s number one in his catalogue raisonné. He decided very early; some artists decide later, some leave it to posterity. But you decided, like Richter, to do your own catalogue raisonné.
JW: Number one is The Destroyed Room [1978], which is the first big coloured photograph that I made. I eliminated the early things I had done from the 60s on, because I didn’t like them. I did them, I learned something from them, I enjoyed doing them. As time went on and I could reflect on them, I realised those were directions that didn’t really correspond to what I wanted. They were experiments that I made to try and find my own identity, but they didn’t convince me, artistically, and they still don’t. I think it’s amusing that people like to have that little book [Landscape Manual] but I don’t think it’s of any artistic value, so I don’t really identify with it very much, because I changed direction rather strongly into the 70s and began to do what I’m still doing now. It was quite a turn away from the idea of the experimentally- formed artwork and the combination of writing and image. I turned away from that for a lot of reasons, including my own critical take on conceptual art and post-conceptual art, I’ve developed those thoughts in a lot of writings over the years. I still consider those early things as having little or no artistic worth, but I don’t care if people know about them – there are more of them of course that nobody, or very few people, have even seen – but I don’t really see them as anything more than a precursor to what I feel I’m doing, that matters to me, at least.

HUO: All roads lead to The Destroyed Room.
JW: Yes, in a way. It was very important to be able to make a picture like that at that moment, because it did contain a lot of the dissatisfactions I’d had in the past. I spent a lot of time studying in London, so it contained a lot of my impulses and thoughts. I was astonished to be able to find a form that I could use to embody that somehow, or present it. It felt like an inaugural moment for me, it was a strong statement about what I thought I could accomplish, and the discovery of the medium through which I could possibly accomplish it.

“I experimented to find a way to combine a literary dimension with a questioning of the artwork and, for that moment, a sort of innovative use of photography.”

HUO: You came back to Vancouver in ‘73 and you say in the Beyeler interview with Martin Schwander that painting, for all its virtues, can never again achieve fidelity, because it’s always mediated through the autographic touch. You don’t have that handiwork in photography, but you think that the experience of writing images – which is obviously what your early work did – stayed with you, so that they’re like scenarios, but unwritten ones. I was looking into unrealised movies some years ago, so I’m interested in pictures like The Destroyed Room, and the hundreds which followed, as being kind of unwritten scenarios. And of course, there is the unity of composition, and at a certain scale. For Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt, and others of their generation, photos were rather small, and the size was always the book. I interviewed Helen Levitt in her apartment; she was very old and was working on her last book. It was a chilly winter day and her cat was sitting between us – there was a lamp in the middle, so the cat sat for the warmth. And so there’s a kind of trialogue between her, her cat, and me. She explained to me that, for her, the ultimate work is the book. She occasionally puts a photograph on the wall, but it’s ultimately the book. Cartier-Bresson told me something similar. Something changes with photography through The Destroyed Room and everything that follows, because you looked at a scale which is much more connected to painting, to Las Meninas [Velázquez, 1656], to the potential of a conversation.
JW: Those people understood photography through the institution of journalism, that’s just the way the art of photography emerged. I loved those people and I admired their work, but I knew that I could never accomplish anything by following that direction. I also realised that that direction was no longer so much of an obligation to a photographer. I think a number of people at that time understood that there were potential energies in the medium of photography that weren’t being released by those conditions, for example, the restraint on scale, restraints that really have nothing to do with photography as such, they really have to do with photography’s relation to other institutions, like journalism, and the book. I didn’t want to make books, I wanted to make pictures that could be experienced the way paintings and drawings could be experienced, because I had gotten a lot out of that, it was how I grew up, looking at pictures in that way, even though I was looking at them in books in the early days.
So I think by 1970, or even earlier, there was a lot of energy inside the photographic world which led to people being more interested in colour and experimenting with formats. If you look at the photographic work from both America and Europe – and other places – around that time… It was Klaus Rinke, Christian Boltanski, Jean Le Gac, and of course Ian Wallace in Vancouver. They were working on new formats, usually
larger, sometimes montages of objects and photographs. Whatever it was, there was a lot of energy in looking for the expanded format of the photographic image, and that’s what I did. The only thing I did a little differently from others was to focus on the unity, or the intensity, of composition of the single image.

I wasn’t interested in the collagist expansion of photography, which sort of comes out of Rauschenberg, but really the resumption, or the reconsideration, of the single image as it’s been defined in our Western tradition. That focus on composition was very important, it gave me a new relationship to tradition. I don’t consider my work ‘traditional’, but I found for myself a new relation with a long tradition of emphatic pictorial composition. The Destroyed Room was a very emphatically artificial project of composition – creating something by the composition of a space. So that deals with your question on the change of the nature of the photograph at that time. As for the question of the unwritten scenario, I’ve tried to define this for myself for years, and the best I can get to is that there is a writing inside of my work, but it is never written. There is a writing act but it doesn’t involve actual writing. If anything, it involves erasing, because in order to develop any subject, even the simplest, you have, in your mind at least, to articulate it to yourself. “I want to do a picture of a man under a tree who’s relating to the shade of that tree in some way.” Just the subject. That is already spoken, and it might as well be written. Now if I go to make that picture, I have to move away from the narrative activity, to the picture-making activity, they’re two different things even though they have a relationship. developed that relationship, or I think about that relationship as the act of erasing the narrative content in the process of making a picture, so there is a writing, but the writing takes the form of erasure.

HUO: As you say, your images are a unified entity, and compelling to look at. You have said they can be more intensely alive than life itself.
JW: As an illusion – you might experience, even briefly, some sort of uncanny liveliness and intensity of the things seen because it’s arrested and doesn’t disappear quickly. It allows you to experience an illusion of actuality that seems more intense than the fleetingness of real life, because if you actually experience something terribly intense it’s usually only for a brief moment, the situation changes so quickly. But when it’s arrested as a picture it persists and that persistence creates this illusion. I don’t believe that images are actually more alive than life itself, but they can create that illusion, even if is one we immediately recognise as nothing but an illusion, we still enjoy it.

HUO: Before you went to London, you knew Ian Wallace, who took over your studio, but you say there wasn’t much of an art scene in Vancouver.
JW: I should be more accurate. In the 1950s and 60s Vancouver had a very alive art world, even though it was small and based mostly on painting, it was very active. There was quite a high level of sophistication among the people I encountered to some degree when I first started hanging around. It wasn’t a grand scene, but it was an oddly intense, cultivated scene that also included writers, poets and educators. In some ways it was a rather good blend of Anglo Canada and influences from the United States, particularly the US West Coast. Many people were travelling from the US to Vancouver to read poetry and teach in the universities. So there was quite a scene in the 50s and 60s. I learned a lot from it early on, but it wasn’t enough for me and, like a lot of people, I just wanted to be somewhere else, in a big city. Vancouver wasn’t in any way a cultural backwater, it was, what I would call, a sophisticated provincial scene. Canadian art in the 40s, 50s and 60s had certain very powerful conventions and traditions. People didn’t really move outside of them and that was one of my dissatisfactions, it was very much involved in certain Canadian cultural, historical attitudes. Nothing wrong with them, they just didn’t suit me. I wanted to be more involved with other things, so I think when I began to really accomplish something based upon a broader field of reference, that disrupted the traditional structure of the scene. Ian did that before me, he brought a lot of new elements into picture-making, I consider him as the original disrupter of the traditional Canadian, or at least West Coast Canadian scene. We did that in a way, both of us, because we were interested in Italian art, French art, German art, contemporary art, we weren’t necessarily always putting forward Canadian models. That was something new, that shook up the situation and opened some doors for other people.

“I wanted to make pictures that could be experienced the way paintings and drawings could be experienced”

HUO: Was it connected to an art school? Because you taught?
JW: I didn’t start teaching until the middle of the 70s, and Ian a little earlier. We both taught for years, we probably did have some influence on students for some time because we talked a lot about what we were interested in, so that must have had some effect.

HUO: Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this little book – Letters to a Young Poet [1929] – which is advice to a young poet, it’s a beautiful small book. A lot of young artists will read our interview, what’s your advice to them?
JW: I’ve always paid a lot of attention to the art I admire. I think I can distinguish better art from less good art, and that’s the art I pay attention to and try to focus on all the time. I guess you would call it a considered, sustained study of figures you admire. That’s all I’ve ever done, and that’s all I can say to anyone else: pay attention to those who you feel you really have the most justified reasons for admiring.

HUO: And then, when your catalogue raisonné begins, it also coincides with another epiphany – you started to work with transparencies. Did you suddenly wake up one day and say, “I’m going to work with transparencies”? It became such an important aspect of your work format.
JW: It was sort of an accident. When I began, as I said, many people were looking for new formats, new approaches. I knew that I wanted to make my work in colour, and I wanted to make it at a scale that was closer to life size; that had to do with the experience of paintings, or what I think we can call the ‘tableau’ form, which means a form in which the image stands autonomously on the wall. The problem in photography has always been how to enlarge and print it. At that time, I did not like conventional colour printing – the ‘type C print’ – because it was so unstable, and I wanted my pictures to be more long- lasting. I couldn’t find a solution until I was introduced to a material that was then called Cibachrome, it was made by Ciba AG, the leading Swiss company in Basel. It was a very permanent colour material, it came on paper and it came on transparent material. I did prints on paper and didn’t like them, the lab guy said, “Why don’t you check this out?” And he showed me the transparent material, and I realised it provided me with a way to do what I wanted right then and there. In addition, it was this strikingly inartistic super- intense visual material that was based on advertising, but of course, it could be used for anything. So, it also had the ‘non-art’ look that people considered important in the 70s. I used it for quite a long time because it did what I wanted it to do at that moment, but I’ve never considered it to be all that important. I suspended doing it about fifteen years ago because I got tired of it. But it did play a very important role for a while in the 70s and 80s.

HUO: There are often documentary pictures in your exhibitions, they are usually black and white. Félix González-Torres once told me that black and white, in our age of omnipresent colour photography, is almost like an act of resistance. Is it that way for you?
JW: I always did documentary photographs, right from the very beginning, because I wanted to keep in play the whole spectrum of what photography could be. I wasn’t interested in the opposition between so-called fiction and so-called fact – I realised photography includes both artifice and its opposite – using the camera in its most direct sense, it is both of those things simultaneously. I’ve always done straight photographic pictures, and I’ve done pictures that resemble straight photographic pictures, quite a lot of them. And, as we just discussed, after about 20 years or so I got tired of making the same transparency image. I got bored with it because I had gotten to the point where I could handle it easily, but it wasn’t challenging me technically anymore, and I was getting to become dissatisfied with some of the restraints that it put on me. I had always wanted to work in some other medium, but it took me a while to get to it. I made a move to black and white in the mid-90s, which was something I had planned for years but couldn’t do until I had built a darkroom – I had to have that kind of control. I make all my prints in my own studio and have done for years, I don’t use labs. So the black and white print was the biggest polar opposite to the colour transparency. I wanted to go there and establish that as a viable alternative. I added black and white prints in the middle of the 90s, and that led me to other things, including a different relationship with photography and with documentary photography, because people identify black and white so much with documentary. I don’t see black and white as a resistance to colour: I think it has an inherent drama, just aesthetically, because a black and white photograph shocks you with the withdrawal, the vanishing of colour. We see in colour, so when we see something that’s not in colour, it has a certain startling quality, an aesthetic that opens up the possibility of experiencing the world differently. So I see it as just another dimension of the image-making process. After all, most drawings made with a pencil or charcoal are also in black and white, they have a different relationship to the subject of the image. Black and white photography continues that idea that there is a domain of seeing that involves the loss of colour as a dramatic aspect of the experience.

HUO: What is the process of making your pictures, your tableaux? You mention drawing, do you sketch the images before, do you make doodles?
JW: I’ve drawn all my life and I still do. There are certain points in the making of a work that sometimes require drawings, usually because one has to imagine something before it exists. So one draws. It could be a composition sketch, it could be a plan for an object that one has to make. It could be a design for a piece of costume… it could be anything. But drawing isn’t strictly necessary to what I do, and for most of my pictures there’s no need for any drawings. Everything is immediately realised by making photographs. So I use drawing when I have a need for it, and I just let it happen as I require it. I think it’s an inherent part of the process if you want it to be.

HUO: Have you ever exhibited the drawings?
JW: No, I think I’ve made some nice drawings in my life, but I’ve almost always made them for a purpose, I’m not interested in exhibiting them. I did publish a couple of drawings in my first catalogue raisonné, they were made to design the ventriloquist’s doll
in A Ventriloquist at a Birthday Party in October 1947 [1990].

HUO: There is also the idea of place – I was thinking of In the Legion [2022] which is named after specific space. Is there a holistic way of connecting your work to space and to time?
JW: Every place is a specific place – it’s just whether it’s my specific place at the time. Many things I’ve done over the years have been based on things I’ve really witnessed but haven’t photographed as they occurred. I could easily decide to start photographing things tomorrow, but I just haven’t. So, if I see some occurrence, I take note of it. Sometimes I’m interested in the place where I’ve actually seen it, but quite often there’s something wrong with that place – it just doesn’t do what I want it to do, even though I don’t know what’s wrong with it. So I go looking for places that are plausible alternatives to what I’ve seen. Then I find something that has some quality that seems to mean something to me in relation to that subject, therefore it becomes part of the subject, and I work with it as a plastic part of the subject. So the Legion hall wasn’t in my original ‘erased scenario’, but I had to do the picture somewhere, and I looked at a lot of different places until I found one that, for many reasons, seemed to be conducive to my inner sense of the picture. It also had a lot of interesting visual qualities of its own, regardless of what I wanted to do with it. The meaning of a picture isn’t based only on what’s happening in it, it’s based on all the colours and shapes and forms and references and qualities of the place, the sky, the trees, the ground, whatever it happens to be, and those are all very specific. I just have to bind them by some process of vague searching, which I do a lot of.

HUO: A question I had – which relates to In the Legion but is also connected to many of your other pictures – is about how you include sudden, fast movements. It could be a backflip, it can be the famous moment with the milk [Milk, 1984] it can be the boy falling from the tree [Boy Falls From Tree, 2010]… how do you bring in these incredibly fast movements into a frozen image? It’s like an oxymoron.
JW: I don’t see it as terribly unusual because, as far as photography is concerned, all movement is fast. Your head is moving fast right now, if I were to photograph you moving your head left to right, it would probably be blurred, because it’s very difficult to capture motion with a camera, it’s not as easy as people think. People’s cameras tend to be small, lightweight and fast, and they normally photograph in bright light, so they don’t notice this problem, but because I work with bigger cameras and bigger lenses, it’s more difficult to capture motion, so I have to go to trouble that most people don’t have to go to, or even think about. But it’s essentially no different than anybody else trying to capture some more or less rapid movement. All photographers essentially do the same thing, it’s just they do them under different conditions and for different purposes. I don’t see it as anything special or even oxymoronic, I think of it was one of the inherent capacities of the medium which is always tested by the speed of life itself.

HUO: Our generation has what Douglas Coupland calls a ‘pre-internet brain’, because we grew up in a time before the Internet. Now we have a generation of artists who are born with the Internet, but when I talk to artists who have a life before that, I am interested in finding out how the arrival of the digital changed their work, also you often said there was a real break in your work with the advent of digital technology.
JW: I think I probably still only have a pre-internet brain, I’m not sure I have a post internet brain [laughs]. I was interested in digital imaging a very long time ago when
I first saw it, because I knew that it was going to do something to photography. One of the problems I had in the era before digital was to find a way to successfully complete the composition of my work and the action in one shot, because I had no alternative in those days, we had no viable possibility of combining images. I was often dissatisfied, to different degrees, with the results of some of my shoots, because some of what I had accomplished I liked, some of what I had accomplished I didn’t like, but both the liked and the not-liked were on the same negative. I recognised that digital montage would allow me to make compositions by combining negatives in certain ways, so I paid close attention to it since the middle of the 80s, but at that time it was not really ready. By about 1990 it was. I realised it would allow me to get away from the single negative, which of course allowed me to get away from ‘pure photography’ if you want to think about it that way. Much of what I’ve made since then – not all of it, but much of it – is technically photomontage, montages of separate images. I hide the joins between the images, so that you are under the illusion that you are seeing a single unified moment in time. I have practiced photomontage in my own way, I guess you could call it ‘invisible photomontage’, and I think that’s something that maybe I’ve practiced a little more intensely than other people. Digital allowed me to create multiple sources for a single composition. The proliferation of images on the net doesn’t have too much effect on me, I want my pictures to be seen physically, I want you to be present in front of the picture-object and see it at the right size. All of my pictures are made at a certain size, and that’s the size they’re meant to be seen. They’re not meant to be seen on the screen or even in a book – they have a more physical relationship to you and your body, and that’s because of the relation to the tableau form. I know my pictures are flying round on the Internet like anyone else’s, but I just see them as reports on what they might look like if you were ever to actually see them. My way of making pictures hasn’t changed because of there being an Internet, but it did change because there is a digital system that can translate material off a piece of photographic film and make it manipulable in a way that it wasn’t previously.

HUO: Can you talk about the work Recovery [2017–18]? It’s really a different way of making images in your work.
JW: That’s the simplest montage I ever made, 99 percent of the picture is the painting, the only thing that was put in is the boy who is photographically rendered. It’s the easiest one I ever did! I made this fantasy image in an old-fashioned format – an oil painting – and photographed it very simply. And then did something that every Photoshop student can do in their first two weeks of class. But nevertheless, it’s still a photomontage. Some montages are made of two pieces of film, some are made of 200.

HUO: Is it a one off or will you do more?
JW: No. People thought I was somehow returning to painting when I made that picture.

HUO: That’s why I was asking!
JW: The painting was made in the same way I made the room for the Invisible Man [After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue., 1999–2000] because it had to come into existence for me to photograph it. It’s the same as any other object I’ve made in order for it to be photographed, in the movies they call them props. They’re just ‘things’ that were made because the photographic process needed them. I painted it because I figured I could, and it had to be a certain kind of style, so I made it in that style, but no, it had nothing to do with me wanting to paint. And if I did paint, I wouldn’t paint that kind of painting.

HUO: You have two shows coming up, one at White Cube, and one at Gagosian, both of which I understand will include works from different periods. I am interested to hear about the selection for the show.
JW: Galleries around the world have gotten so much bigger than they used to be, so it’s much more difficult, for me, to make enough new pictures in a short period of time to fill up a gallery properly. It has become necessary to add a few other pictures from different times. The selection is limited by what’s available of course, but I’ve been able to find a few pictures from two or even from twenty, years ago, that somehow resonate nicely with the new ones. And that allows me to make a show that occupies the gallery properly but also, in a way, makes a more interesting kind of exhibition. One of the things I did in Basel was to create each room in the Beyeler Foundation show as a kind of ensemble of images that somehow related to each other, spoke to each other, made resonance between them. I think that’s more interesting and exciting somehow for the viewer, to see things that bounce thoughts or feelings or genres amongst different times. With White Cube, Jay [Jopling, founder of White Cube] and I have been working together for 30 years, since ‘94, and so we are doing a big exhibition in his enormous space in Bermondsey, which is very much like the one in Basel. There’s a lot of pictures that came from Basel. The show at Gagosian in New York only has twelve pictures – all of my new ones from ‘22, ‘23 alongside the older ones.

HUO: Can you talk about the new pictures you’ll show?
HW: In The Legion still counts as a new picture, although you saw it in Basel, it hasn’t been seen in a gallery before. Fallen Rider [2022] was also in Basel – it’s a woman falling from her horse. The picture of the elderly lady in a bookstore apparently mending a sock, called Maquette for a monument [2023], that’s there. A picture I made in Barcelona as a result of a commission from the City of Barcelona [Informant: An occurrence not described in chapter 6, part 3 of “Últimas tardes con Teresa” by Juan Marsé, 2023] is going to be there, it’s going to be the first time it will be shown. A picture I made in ‘23 [Echo Park, 2023] will be there.

“I wasn’t interested in the opposition between so-called fiction and so-called fact – I realised photography includes both artifice and its opposite”

HUO: My only recurring question in all my many artist conversations, is about the unrealised project. We know very little about artists’ unrealised projects. We know about architects’ unrealised projects because they publish them as part of competitions. The range of the unrealised can be very broad, it could be projects which have been too big, too expensive, too time-intensive, forgotten, neglected, maybe also projects that were censored, or self-censored, projects we want to do but haven’t dared to. Can you tell me about a some of your unrealised projects?
JW: I don’t think I have unrealised projects. I have failures! That is, things I attempted to do, and failed at for one reason or another. I must say, happily, they haven’t failed very often. There are two sorts of failure: I will have confidence in the starting point, the subject if you want to call it that, I somehow believe in it, until one day I don’t believe in it anymore. The reason why that happens is hard to explain. All of the pictures I’ve made have a subject, at some point in my reflection on my subject – and it could be while I’m actually working on it – it just goes away. It just dies, it evaporates, and I don’t want to do it anymore. So that is ‘not realised’, but not because it was unrealised, but because I abandoned it. Occasionally, and fortunately this is very seldom, and I can only think of one or two examples, I’ve actually gone into physically making the picture quite seriously and had the same thing happen, I simply lost confidence in it artistically, critically, and had to stop.

HUO: You say you never wanted a style where the pictures resemble each other, but you have also said there is often an anomalous element in the area you are photographing, a disturbance in the composition. What is this anomalous element you are looking for?
JW: Let me give you an example. In The Storyteller [1986], you are looking across at the group of people on a sloping bank. I tried to compose that very properly, and I think I did, but because there’s a road in between, a road you cannot see because I excluded it from the frame, there are elevated electric lines for the buses using that road, and those lines cut through the composition. It was something that I would rather – if I had pure choice – probably not have had there, but because I wasn’t able to get rid of them, they’re there. In a way, that’s an intrusion, but the intrusion makes the picture better. I know that often, things that annoy me in the space, things that I initially don’t like, are what I need to have, so I keep them, because they create a more dialectic notion of the harmony of the picture. I don’t want my pictures to be too harmonious.

Interview originally published in The HERO Winter Annual 2024.