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Lot Essay
'From the late 1970s onward, serious art photography began to be made at large scale and for the wall...This immediately compelled photographers to grapple with issues centering on the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it that until then had been the province only of painting...This means that the photographic 'ghetto' no longer exists-instead photography is at the cutting edge of contemporary art as never before.' (M. Fried, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, New Haven, 2008, inside cover).
The photography of James Welling, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall typifies the movement away from the idea that photography is merely a documentary medium to one that embraced 'photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery' (K. Barker, 'Photography With An Eye For Social Relevance', San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2008, p. C12). Considered the father of the 'Vancouver School' of conceptual photography, Ian Wallace was one of the pioneers of this new form of visual expression. His images of a group of teenage boys playing football on a Brussels street are interrupted by a column of acrylic woodcut. On one hand abstract, yet on the other seemingly at home in the composition, these forms challenge traditional norms of representation and defy our assumptions about the medium of photography.
James Welling's MTPL-I, D&H Unit Coal Train, Binghamton, NY continues this examination of the theoretical separation of abstraction and figuration. Without the introduction of unrelated elements as in the case of the works by Wallace, Welling focuses purely on the factors provided by the image he captures - the rigid lines of the train's construction, the blackness of the telegraph poles against the empty of the sky and even the train tracks that disappear into oblivion as they dissolve into the distance - to question the very nature of what we see and how we comprehend it. Similarly, in Ravenstein, Welling captures daylight streaming through a large doomed roof to produce a work of abstract elegance.
Regarded as one of the leaders of his generation, the conceptual photographer Jeff Wall's Green Rectangle concentrates on the formal components of the image rather than the overall meaning of the composition. Here, Wall reinterprets modernist concerns with plane, colour and form and updates them to apply to modern photographic practice, in the process producing a work of formal beauty that is almost devoid of any narrative content. Between them these three artists helped forge a new direction for the medium of photography. Their aesthetic and conceptual abilities have resulted in works that are both intellectually and artistically stimulating and remain all the more exhilarating for that.
The photography of James Welling, Ian Wallace and Jeff Wall typifies the movement away from the idea that photography is merely a documentary medium to one that embraced 'photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery' (K. Barker, 'Photography With An Eye For Social Relevance', San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2008, p. C12). Considered the father of the 'Vancouver School' of conceptual photography, Ian Wallace was one of the pioneers of this new form of visual expression. His images of a group of teenage boys playing football on a Brussels street are interrupted by a column of acrylic woodcut. On one hand abstract, yet on the other seemingly at home in the composition, these forms challenge traditional norms of representation and defy our assumptions about the medium of photography.
James Welling's MTPL-I, D&H Unit Coal Train, Binghamton, NY continues this examination of the theoretical separation of abstraction and figuration. Without the introduction of unrelated elements as in the case of the works by Wallace, Welling focuses purely on the factors provided by the image he captures - the rigid lines of the train's construction, the blackness of the telegraph poles against the empty of the sky and even the train tracks that disappear into oblivion as they dissolve into the distance - to question the very nature of what we see and how we comprehend it. Similarly, in Ravenstein, Welling captures daylight streaming through a large doomed roof to produce a work of abstract elegance.
Regarded as one of the leaders of his generation, the conceptual photographer Jeff Wall's Green Rectangle concentrates on the formal components of the image rather than the overall meaning of the composition. Here, Wall reinterprets modernist concerns with plane, colour and form and updates them to apply to modern photographic practice, in the process producing a work of formal beauty that is almost devoid of any narrative content. Between them these three artists helped forge a new direction for the medium of photography. Their aesthetic and conceptual abilities have resulted in works that are both intellectually and artistically stimulating and remain all the more exhilarating for that.