Comprobación de la Hipótesis

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Fig.15. Jeff Wall, View from an Apartment, Transparency and Lightbox, 167 x 244 cm, 2005.73

When the intention of the work is to invite a conceptual response (that is, a response which requires the viewer to enact a particular set of ideas through imaginative, empathetic or cognitive responses) the form of presentation must be appropriate to that aim. Jeff Wall’s work requires the viewer to abandon standard forms. His large format photographic works are not about the presentation of (photographic) information, narrative, the arrested moment, beauty or any other of the normal photographic discourses. His work, if anything, is more about the compositional and narrative artifice of painting74

In contrast, Pictures of the Body accepts the predetermined compositional information supplied through the process of (standard) photography and prefers to undermine its conformity

. His photographs are very carefully ‘composed’ and arranged. They are works of fiction. View from an Apartment recalls the family snapshot, the record of place and time that triggers nostalgia. In fact the image recalls no specific nostalgia because it is entirely fictional. What it does bring to mind are the reader’s own associations with nostalgia, intimacy and domesticity. The apartment that this image was staged in was carefully chosen because of its view, and the juxtaposition of the messy domesticity with the messy city outside. Wall makes full use of the advantage of compositional discretion that painting has at its disposal. All his work uses this freedom to arrange compositional values according to his intent in directing his audience towards particular (painterly) interpretations.

to this standard by substituting an abstract approximation for the (superfluous) information revealed. The similarity of the photograph and ordinary vision is substantiated by the information surplus of both, but also by the arbitrary composure of the visual perception of everyday life. A photographer may value the chance of a balanced or, say, tense composition but composition is a cultural construct and not consistent with everyday vision. The choice has been made in Pictures of the Body to avoid repositioning people or objects for compositional reasons because that would undermine the paintings’ (photographic) truth claim. View from an Apartment on the other hand uses both (contrived) detail and deliberate composition to move perception towards painterly discourses. It is interesting to note one of these: the slight clumsiness of the woman in the left of the image. She has an awkwardness similar to Golub’s figures but for slightly different reasons. Wall chooses to leave the artificiality (read staged nature) of his methods of image construction evident. Golub on the other hand gives his figures a Frankenstein ungainliness to augment the grotesquery of violence. The effect is similar in presenting an unease that creates a pause and a question for the viewer75.

Fig. 16. Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan), 1986, Lightbox, 229 x 417cm, 1992.

Jeff Wall’s work Dead Troops Talk (Fig.16) plays more directly with the truth claim in inducing affect, as if the work represented a truth, at the same time as formatting it in a way that is

manifestly a dramatic and fanciful simulation. (In the ‘photograph’, the soldiers are presented as interacting in a very lively and jovial fashion after death.) As with all of Wall’s work this photograph is the product of months of work, hundreds of digital shots and the amalgamation of a selection of these multiple takes, through computer technology. I also note the sumptuous production, miniscule detail and huge scale of Wall’s works, which confuse the documentary reference, and the surreal and macabre humour of the simulated wounds and play.

Fig. 17. Jeff Wall, details from Dead Troops Talk

While the association of the photograph with the idea of index carries a past acceptance, works such as Wall’s undermine the efficacy of that connection through playing with our (false) understanding. It is important to note that Wall’s imagery relies totally on that false indexical association to convey the complex levels of meaning that can be constructed from the work. But it should be noted that part of his comment does relate to the real and actual events of the Afghan war76. The images still invoke narrative documentary as part of their emotional impact and affect. The referential potential of the indexical relationship (as icon, imprint, transfer, clue or trace77) is useful, because it is lacking as an ‘apparently intrinsic’ quality, in other media. It is perfectly possible to make a presentation ‘as true’ through fictive media – novel, painting, print or poem say. The difference with photography is that the claim in photography has been seen as intrinsic rather than as artifice78. ‘Reality’ must stay in inverted commas when equated with photography because even if the indexical relationship is accepted, the idea that the photograph signifies truth is still contestable79

The investigation into if how and why a truth claim, even a dubious one, invests imagery with an increased impact, is difficult to resolve in terms other than that of generalised cultural precedent. We treat ‘actual’ experience as being qualitively different from fiction when in fact it is not.

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80 The most rewarding avenue for resolution is to consider the visual truth claim as though it were true

for the purposes of that reference, while knowing that it is in fact not true. Alan Sekula disputes the notion of a photograph’s status as a neutral notation of event and emphasises this functional aspect, in terms of the representational task required:

A photographic discourse is a system within which the culture harnesses photographs to various representational tasks…Every photographic image is a sign, above all, of someone’s investment in the sending of a message.81

Sekula’s idea still recognises the habit of photography’s long connection with ‘objectivity’ science and ‘truth’. He is saying that one of photography’s tasks is to point to an actual event in / as time. This argument avoids any idea that intrinsic qualities make the photographic message distinct. He simply asserts that cultural conventions and history determine that the photograph is to be treated as a sign and that this representational mode is an indicator that the subject of reference is the ‘real world’82

The habit of photography’s historical association with scientific ‘objective’ discourse has created a sort of branding that is hard to dislodge even through good argument. Susan Sontag implies that attitudes about photography are not responsive to logical examination and that the way we perceive a photograph is not justified by intrinsic qualities:

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Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks…The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be knowledge at bargain prices – a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom;83

Sontag raises questions about the way knowledge or ‘wisdom’ is achieved through the perceptive mechanism of looking. Her implication, that photographs do not in themselves provide any basis for understanding, could probably be extended reasonably to the act of looking generally. Just as the image itself is mute, so looking is also mute. Understanding predates looking in all its forms.84 The implication of this is that formatting, other than that generated by the narrative content or detail of the picture, is necessary in order to constitute the communication. The picture is contextualised by discourses that are external to it.