Jeff Wall has had retrospective exhibitions at London’s Tate Modern and New York's Museum of Modern Art. He recently had a show at White Cube Mason's Yard, consists of three large-scale colour transparencies mounted on aluminium light-boxes, of the kind that Wall has been making since the late 1970s, and six black-and-white photographs. All the pieces have been created in the past year or so, and are priced between £100,000 and £400,000.
One image I really like is ‘Dressing Poultry’, in which three women process chicken carcasses in a cluttered barn on a small farm near Vancouver. The women laugh as they go about their gory business, loading headless chickens into an old plucking machine, before transferring their corpses to a table. To the left, hunks of pink and pimply flesh hang from a rope. He paid farm hands let to him document their work over several days.
Although famous for grand tableaux, which he shoots in sections over several months before stitching together the final image using computer montage, for this he did not digitally manipulate the image but still took several hundred shots. But in this case, he paid the farm-hands to let him document their work.
I like his heightened sense of the surreal – the happy women with dead chickens and it seems to almost present a vision of hell, with the detrius of modern life, like a Bruegel painting. It is his sense of form that means critics have placed his work not only in context of the history of photography but of art.
Much of his work records everyday objects and people but not in a grand way. A bar of soap in a dirty sink, a takeaway carton, it seems to represent everyday life of people and objects that are disposable, that have been discarded and thrown out as rubbish. They are not happy pictures but are often a depressing representation of the bottom of the heap.
Dressing Poultry (2007) by Jeff Wall
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