Jeff Wall: ‘Meaning is Important, but Not to Me’

Jeff Wall crafts timeless pictures from circumstance, narrative incident and happenstance. Whether reimagining a fight about to explode on a street corner, capturing a seemingly desultory view of Los Angeles’s Echo Park or depicting an empty grave flooded with water, his glowing cibachrome photographs pull viewers into a world rich in mysterious possibilities. Wall’s current exhibition, ‘Time Stands Still’, at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, is one of his largest to date. Containing 63 works, it spans from the mid-1980s – when he was a young artist associated with the Vancouver School – to the 2020s. With such an expansive exhibition comes the opportunity to see the seamless continuity of ideas in his remarkable oeuvre – many of which, as he explains here, are new even to the artist himself.

Charlotte Jansen ‘Time Stands Still’ is one of the largest exhibitions you’ve done. How did you approach it?

Jeff Wall I’m happy to show my work anywhere I’m invited. I’ve known Sérgio Mah [the exhibition curator] for quite a few years now. He’s a very good person and curator so, when he asked me, I said yes straight away. The MAAT building has a lot of space, so we needed more pictures than I’d originally thought, and they were enthusiastic about that, even though it is so costly these days. It’s maybe the second biggest exhibition I’ve done after Schaulager in Basel in 2005.

When I make an exhibition, I discover affinities between pictures and notice recurring themes that I didn’t intend to create. I try to make groupings to bring that out. We noticed viewers like that, to see four or five pictures with something in common, even if that something is indefinable.

CJ What are some of the specific realizations you had?

JW One of the most obvious things is the number of pictures of people seated on the ground. I don’t like to interpret my work when it’s finished, but I noticed this pattern, so it must mean something. Those sorts of things can seem obvious, but if the pictures look good together, it gets interesting. It’s all about how things look. A picture is all appearance.

CJ You once said that we are drawn to certain photographs because they combine aesthetic and emotional experiences. Until you and some of your peers came along, photography was considered an objective medium, but aesthetic and emotion are both in the realm of the subjective.

JW I have no quarrel with objectivity, but I realized in the 1970s, when I began working in this way, that, although it’s the most important form of photography, it’s not the horizon of what can be done with the medium artistically. It’s something I learned primarily from painting and cinema. Cinematographers taught me that there are a lot of ways of being a photographer that photography had excluded because of its intense devotion to documentary truth. Maybe what I do is not the most important kind of photography, but it’s still worthwhile. The attitude of artistic freedom towards photography – of using other methods to make photographs – is the ground upon which the ability to be subjective emerges.

CJ You often use the word ‘accident’ to talk about your photographs. They are also endlessly interpretable, which is part of their abiding beauty.

JW My work is all about accidents, in a way. I like the incidental, unplanned encounters everyone has every day. Pictorial art has an inherent literary, narrative dimension. It emerges from something in time, but this element is annulled by rendering it static, halting the narrative and leaving a composition that pauses time mid-flow. To work on the picture, I have to stop telling myself the story, but the viewer will narrate what I’ve suspended.

Everything I do comes out of a circumstance. That’s what I’m looking for – I can’t even claim to be concerned with the subjects of my work. All the rest of it – the emotional, the political, the meaning – all that is important, but not to me. I think it works better for me to not be that interested in it, otherwise the outcome becomes predictable.

CJ How do you manage to do that?

JW I develop my own techniques for shutting things out.

CJ Has that changed over the decades as you’ve become more successful?

JW I was always pretty wilful and I have a talent for ignoring things. It’s a kind of devotion to the idea of freedom. I am very excited about what I’m doing and I can easily get lost in it. The well-madeness of art comes out of this process. I always did it that way; I didn’t have to be successful to do it. But that state of freedom is what I am devoted to. That sparkle of individual liberty is part of what people love about art.

CJ It’s interesting that you mention the well-madeness of art. Craftsmanship is something that’s very important when it comes to looking at your photographs.

JW Art shows you what it’s like when things are done well. I have the feeling that, when we appreciate a work of art or craft, we intuit that the well-doneness can be a model for all our activities – the way we deal with our work and responsibilities, our relationships and so on. I guess it’s a pretty old-fashioned idea that the arts expose you to certain valuable energies and ideas, but it doesn’t seem to have gone away.

CJ I’m struck by the fact that it’s hard to distinguish any time periods in your photographs. A photograph you made in 1985 doesn’t look so different from one you made in 2025. I think that is also due to the universality of some of the things you depict: Insomnia [1994], for example.

JW Titling that picture Insomnia was a mistake. I might have titled it Night Kitchen or something more neutral, more Edward Hopper-ish. It was set off by that kitchen, which was – and still is – in a small house I acquired as part of a studio building. The green, yellow and white colour scheme and the hard light from the antiquated ceiling fixture somehow evoked the figure [of a middle-aged man]. This is an example of the ‘anything anywhere’ starting points for me. I guess whatever ‘universal’ or enduring quality the picture might have is related to the unknowns in my own motivation. As I said, the kitchen still exists and is in use, so it has survived many periods and, in doing so, belongs to many periods. The paper bag on top of the fridge was an accident – I had been to the hardware store and forgot I had left it there.

CJ I was thinking about Tina Campt’s book Listening to Images [2017] and the sonic quality many of your photographs seem to have. Is this something you think about?

JW If you pay attention to it, an image includes – in some sort of oblique, negative fashion – sound and motion. What’s been silenced? My picture The Storyteller [1986], for example, has a sonic quality: you are looking at an overpass, and you know there’s a roar of traffic coming from it, but you can’t hear it, you can see it. There’s a suppressed element. The same goes for images of people talking: you have to supply the dialogue yourself. The viewer writes the story.

CJ Event [2021] has that quality, too. Can you tell me more about that picture?

JW A man pokes another man in the chest. A conversation may be about to turn into something else. I had seen this happen on a street corner, possibly the beginning of a physical altercation. The actual setting did not please me, didn’t open up to anything I felt was meaningful. In principle, I feel free to engage in a process of composition, changing and reshaping any element of the original occurrence. So, it migrated to a hotel ballroom where some sort of public event is taking place, an event which required the men invited to be dressed in formal evening wear. Since we see them from a slight distance, we sense that we would not be able to hear their conversation amid the overall noise.

CJ Don’t you want to know why you do these things?

JW No, because I’m not a miserable person, and I don’t need to analyze myself to make myself happier. No one can ever see what I’ve done the way I see it. It is fascinating to me how the work lives in the minds of others and might merge with the public world of meanings. I don’t have anything to contribute that wouldn’t spoil it for others.

Jeff Wall’s ‘When Time Stands Still’ is on view at MAAT, Lisbon, until 1 September

_{Main image: Jeff Wall, ‘After Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, 1999–2000, transparency in lightbox; 1.7 × 2.5. Courtesy: the artist}