‘Jeff Wall & David Campany in Conversation’

White Cube Companion, White Cube Gallery, 2025

Edited and co-ordinated by Honey Luard and Elaine ML Tam
Editorial assistance by Louise Parfitt and Miranda Yates
Designed by (Studio) Sandra Kassenaar

Printed by Robstolk, Netherlands
150 x 225 mm, softback
264 pages, colour illustrations throughout
ISBN 978-1-910844-79-3
Published by White Cube, September 2025

Companion, White Cube gallery’s annual reader, is a compilation of contemporary art and discourse. Visual essays, in-conversations, lectures, poetry, artist writings and newly commissioned texts are just some of the forms of creative expression and scholarship brought together in a single volume.

Available here

 

Jeff Wall and David Campany in conversation
21 November 2024, White Cube Bermondsey, London

David Campany: [To audience] It has just been one of the joys of my life to follow Jeff’s work since around the age of 18. I still remember that first show with White Cube in 1991, 30-some years ago, and that was not even the first time I had seen the work. Jeff, since this is a moment for looking back, I wanted to ask you about judging your past work. I know that you proceed with no great plan, just one picture at a time, as the opportunities arise. When you do look back, do you see particular lines of development and direction? Are you surprised by what you have done?

Jeff Wall: I have helped to plan the exhibitions that we have done this year. Martin Schwander and I discussed the plans for Fondation Beyeler for a long time and what became interesting was to group together pictures that seemed to have some resonance, whether it was formal or on the level of subject, or maybe what you might call a genre.
I deliberately try not to, one, look back; two, repeat myself; and three, work in groups. When I look back, I am surprised to see echoes between different pictures because I’m not conscious of that when I’m doing them. In fact, what I am conscious of is trying not to do anything I have ever done before. It is sort of disappointing or alarming that one sees things recurring. There are a lot of people sitting on the ground in my pictures, for example, and I don’t really have an answer for it.
One of the more interesting things that emerged was the presence of a pastoral motif. Pastoral, in the way that I interpret it, means the relationship people wished they had to nature, but don’t have. Or if they do have it, they are losing it, or it is conditional, which then makes it ‘anti-pastoral’. There is no longer the possibility of the pastoral relationship to nature that is seen in Classical art or Early Classical art, for the obvious reason that we don’t live in nature in that way anymore. I think that is one underlying subject of a lot of my pictures, which I had never thought about much until I started to look back.

DC: I am struck by the fact that your pictures do not feel dated. I suppose that expectation that they would is an inheritance from modernism, from what Walker Evans called the ‘documentary style’: the idea that photographs are timestamped, contingent. Made at this time of day, in this month, this year. That was an important part of what photography carried into the arts but also into its vernacular forms. When I look at your pictures though, I am genuinely amazed at how contemporary they feel. They are not timestamped in that emphatic or obvious way that we usually think about when we think of photography.

JW: Yes, that has occurred to me. I learned a lot from painting as I have said many times, though I do not do anything remotely like painting. People have said to me that my work is so like painting, it must be a sort of ersatz painting. I reject that point of view because what I am doing is photography, and everything that I do is photographic. Nonetheless, one of my experiences of painting is precisely that suspension of time, and paintings I like often do not seem to be time-bound.
I just went to see the Van Gogh exhibition [‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’, National Gallery, London], and some of his pictures seem like they could have been painted today. There were a few in the exhibition that struck me in that way – streetscapes that looked like snapshots, for instance. I think painting has taught me a means of having a sovereign relation to time, that photography in its documentary sense didn’t want or – and I hate to say this – simply didn’t think of. The reason I hate to say it is because I don’t like to criticise photography because, after all, I am just another photographer.
Timestamping, I believe, is something that a lot of photographers want – to mark that moment. It is not primary for me. I like the fact that you can’t really tell if certain of my pictures are from the ’80s or ’90s; you can’t really distinguish much in them that could not be done now. You will see very few advertisements in the backgrounds of my pictures. I avoid them precisely because of that sort of thing. I am not against it, but I am also not for it. This picture, Tattoos and Shadows, 2000, is 25 years old, and it is a little dated maybe, but people are probably still wearing Bukowski t-shirts. I just think there is something compellingly beautiful about that suspension, where you are not locked into a moment and the image has a psychic and aesthetic freedom.

DC: Your White Cube show begins with one image that I have never seen exhibited before, Pleading [1982], which is redolent of those everyday details of the street. That was made differently to the way you usually work.

JW: It was a snapshot. I made it in Soho walking along the sidewalk in 1982 simply because I happened to be here and captured that moment, that gesture. I was just interested, like any photographer. When I saw the negative or the slide, I noticed that this young woman in the Salvation Army was almost praying for the wellbeing of the young man with the camera, with her eyes closed. It seemed like a gesture so meaningful, I just had to print it.
Recently, I realised that I foreclosed the idea of snapshots in my work back in the ’80s and ’90s. I have done one or two others, but very few. I think it was a real mistake to rule out snapshot photography as much as I have done. If I had not thought that way, I probably would have made five or six more pictures like Pleading. Though they would have been timestamped in a way that I may not want, I also totally accept when it happens. Actually, I misdated that photograph for many years; I thought it was made in 1984, but we noticed that the play on the poster with Glenda Jackson [Summit Conference by Robert David MacDonald] was staged in 1982 so, in fact, the photo had to be made in 1982.

DC: Do you feel it is too late to work with snapshots now?

JW: It is not too late. I have my camera with a new battery ready to go, so I may be able to do something. It may only result in two or three pictures, but who knows.

DC: What excited me when I first saw your work might have to do with the fact that cinema was my first love, and I sidestepped into photography from looking at film stills in books. To go back to Pleading and the idea of the snapshot – the snapshot closes the gap between observation and picture-making, so that they almost collapse into the same thing. I think of you as having expanded it. I know you often say you begin by not photographing; you might notice, read or hear something, and that might be the beginning of the adventure of trying to make a picture. Suddenly, there’s a much bigger gap between observation and the making of the picture. You may regret having passed up on the snapshot, but so much else has opened up in its place.

JW: Yes. Even when I say that I don’t photograph, I still consider ‘not-photographing’ an act of photography. It is a relationship to photography that has worked for me, in the sense of escaping the motif or what I call the subject. This escape is as decisive a moment or an experience as capturing it then and there. They are the same thing. Remember, the camera does not realise when it has missed a moment.
I think like a camera in that sense, in trying not to make judgements about whether I have done things the right or the wrong way, which also has to do with artistic freedom. If we really believe that there is such a thing as artistic freedom, that means we are free to develop our relationships to our materials, our subject matter, everything, as we want to. There is a real photographic relationship present in not making a photograph; the space that opens up has to do with my own personal capture, be it my memory or my decision about the validity of what I experienced. So, it is also a process of pondering the validity of what I saw. There is no real difference between all of that and a person who takes pictures and then rejects the picture after it has been made.
I think that is where the word ‘cinematography’ comes in, because what it allowed for was these other ways of making or, let us say, composing a picture.

DC: With the snapshot, people tend to think of the photographer as being less involved in the world, observing and reacting very quickly. On the other hand, trying to find a location for a picture, working with other people, or having to get into certain kinds of theatricality… all of those things we associate with cinema. But they have also been part of photography since forever. I assume you enjoy all of that.

JW: I think what I call cinematography follows on from those photographers who have had to work on films, who get themselves out of corners that they have been painted into by the situations they are obliged to deal with. That kind of creativity is very important, and it has led to a way of looking at photography that is more expanded, technically. As soon as you diverge from the direct relationship of the camera to the moment, you enter a space that is full of new problems. I must enjoy those problems.
My real commitment is to composition and picture-making. What we really like about pictures is their ‘goodness’ – meaning their ‘well-madeness’ – and the result of that, which we might call their ‘beautifulness’. And this is not to avoid the word beauty, which people don’t like to use anymore; we might call ‘beautifulness’ a quality that nobody wants to admit that they enjoy but do. ‘Goodness’ is the outcome of the making of the picture or the sculpture or whatever, the work of composition, which is what all artists do.
My only objection to straight photography was that it meant accepting less freedom than a poet, painter or musician would have. I did not see any reason to make that sacrifice in the name of some aspect of photography which is totally valid but not all encompassing. So yes, I like solving problems. Technical problems are fascinating in the way that all physical work is fascinating. It is very satisfying to make something well, no matter what it is. Art is not the only place where one makes well and enjoys it… it could be a shoe or a painting or a door handle.

DC: A big part of what I enjoy about your work is the stillness and the muteness – the way in which an image suspends a story or narrative, but also evacuates sound. There are a number of your pictures in this show where people are communicating but we can’t know what they are saying, for example The Storyteller [1986] and Listener [2015]. By their titles you would think the quality of muteness would be antithetical to these subjects of a picture. But in fact, they are fascinating precisely because of what the stillness and the muteness refuse to disclose.

JW: Yes, but I don’t think my pictures are any more still than anyone else’s. I think the effect that you are referring to is related to the presence of this tableau framework and the scale more than any motion capture issue, because every camera does that the same. It has to do with the compositions and the overall making. These pictures are so subject to gravity presented in this format, there is an enhancement of some of the ordinary or continuous qualities of photography. I like that, and that is something I did learn from painting because, remember, painting invented this sense of the scale of pictures. Pictures that can occupy space in a way that is close to how we occupy space, and that make us see what is in them in a way that is close to the way we see when we are not looking at pictures.

That is the gist of what we consider any realism in art to be: the artwork resembles what you see even when you are not looking at art, and scale fundamentally has to do with that. It is so familiar that maybe when it got transposed to photography – somewhat systematically in the ’80s – it seemed novel. Perhaps it has not been dealt with very much in the ways that photography has been discussed. Many of my pictures are at what I consider a universal scale, sometimes called ‘life scale’. That is the scale that we all see in organically, because the universe is in one scale apparently – or at least the part that we know – and that is the only scale we trust to be objective. There is an objectivity that enters the picture when you use universal scale that is profound in a way that is hard to grasp. It means you are getting close or analogous to the experience of something. I think that is why a larger picture has this strange ability to give you the illusion that it is more life-like than life.

DC: Your relationship with White Cube started with an image that is a bit of a conundrum here. That first show I mentioned earlier debuted The Giant [1992], an image of a nude woman standing halfway up a staircase in a library. She is completely out of scale with the space that she is in. How did you decide on the dimensions of that one?

JW: Actually, it follows on exactly from what I have said. To do a picture of a giant at universal scale would be rather difficult – the giant would be 30 feet high in person but, even at that distance from the camera, she would be 12 feet high in the picture, so the overall picture would wind up 30 feet high. I am not Anselm Kiefer! It just seemed utterly implausible.
The fact that the giant is outside of universal scale suggests that the only way to deal with it would be – to use another painting analogy – to deal with it in the way that [Jan] van Eyck might, who, by the way, did a giant Madonna in a church. And that is another lesson that one learns: the game of universal scale is not played the same way all the time. I don’t claim that working in universal scale is the only good way to work though, I simply think it is a ground note that can determine a way of working and make it more interesting. What The Giant showed me was that I could make small pictures if I wanted to.

DC: You mentioned that the tableau form, the singular composed picture, is an invitation to make a judgement about whether one tableau is better than another. But what about your works that comprise more than one image; what is the artistic judgement of a diptych or a triptych?

JW: Judgement, in what sense?

DC: Well, what would make it good or not good?

JW: I think what would make it good would be the same as what would make anything else good. We think of ‘goodness’ as an aesthetic judgement. We don’t necessarily want to get into that topic right now because it is a big one… but it is a topic that anyone who is interested in art knows something about, in that we do make comparative judgements of artworks in all kinds of complicated ways that nobody really ends up agreeing about. I don’t think any formal aspect of the artwork makes the slightest difference.
Most of the time, I have made multi-panel pictures because something of the original subject escaped in the process of its making, and it requires me to respond to that. In some instances, I have dropped the subject or allowed the starting point to die. I say ‘die’, because if something escapes that cannot be resolved as a picture, it’s gone. On other occasions, a second picture emerges from the first; something may have escaped but it will get resolved differently, in another picture.
It is not in the show, but I did a picture of two views of the same apartment [Summer Afternoons, 2013]. It was the apartment that my wife and I lived in, here in London in the ’70s, and I reconstructed it because I wanted to do a picture of a man on the floor in the sunshine. It wasn’t about me, but I wanted it to be in that apartment. One part of the freedom that I like about the cinematographic approach is that subjects can be detached from where they originally occur and be moved to another place where they occur better artistically. I worked on the motif of the single man, and, at some point, I knew it was not going to work unless there was another person in that apartment. So, I added the woman in the second picture, which is photographed from a different angle. From the two angles, you can’t be sure that they were ever in that apartment together. That lack of certainty was also interesting. Point being, that second image grew out of the first, and it grew out of the first because there was something that required it.

DC: The reason I asked the question is that I find in a lot of your multi-panel pieces something quite psychically disturbing, but also disturbing of aesthetic judgement. If we take two examples, Pair of interiors [2018] and Actor in two roles [2020], they set up for the viewer this almost forensic checking of faces and details. In Pair of interiors, there is a couple sitting  in a room. Then, there is another view of  the same room and it might be the same couple, but if you look closely, you discover they are different people. That is very disturbing.

JW: Disturbing good or disturbing bad?

DC: I remember when I saw it for the first time at White Cube Mason’s Yard [2019], I found it kind of nightmarish.

JW: Well, that is a little melodramatic, I have to say! I don’t want to create any backstories to my pictures. These days, everyone has a backstory to their art, and I really don’t like that. I think the so-called backstory should be erased in the experience of the picture.

DC: Nevertheless…

JW: Nevertheless, I have always been struck – and this probably has to do with having a photographic eye – by resemblances between people who don’t actually look like each other. I always see people who remind me of someone else, and I wanted to find a way to bring that into visibility as a picture. I had spent a lot of time in that room because it is my house, and it seemed there was a way in which I could bring together a lot of energies. My multi-panel pictures also have a lot to do with how to photograph a room. If you look at it carefully, there are a lot of things about the way those rooms are photographed which are interesting aside from the subject of the two people. Resemblance is phantom experience, and many people don’t notice at first glance that they are not the same people. But that is not a trick that I am playing, that is just a condition of perception and of how we relate to other people. All of that seemed to be a rich subject for a picture. It didn’t seem like that could be done well in just a single panel. The disturbing element – yes, I guess that is disturbing. Identity, lack of identity. It is uncanny, I agree. There is an uncanny element, and I am not against that.

DC: I think it has to do with the shuttling of my eye between one panel and the other, which you have to do quite a lot in a work like I giardini / The Gardens Appunto / Complaint, Disappunto / Denial, Diffida / Expulsion order [2017] which is a very large, three-panel piece. You have made quite a few pictures in Italy, and though I don’t think of you as being regional in any way, can you say something about that?

JW: Not really! I floated to Italy in the same way I would float to anywhere else. [Henri] Cartier-Bresson made a point of circling the globe and photographing everywhere and that’s great, but I would never be able to do anything like that. I do not like travelling very much and my pictures emerge from stuff that floats toward me. For example, I had been in Ireland at some point years ago and loved the hills covered with the stones and the low stone walls. That would be a beautiful picture to make, I thought, and yet, I did it in Sicily. I didn’t have any particular affinity to Sicily or any backstory, I simply had this image of the stony hillside in my mind. I just thought Ireland might have good stone walls and hillsides, and I found one. What I like about that picture is that it seems so eternal.
In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard [1958], set in Eastern Sicily, two of the characters are walking their dogs and maybe hunting up the hillside. Tomasi di Lampedusa comments on how this hillside would have been seen by the ancient Greeks – who were the occupants of Sicily 2,000 years ago – because it has never really changed, it has never been under cultivation. I could have done it in Sicily, but I like the opportunities that come my way, however they come. It’s not that I like Vancouver particularly but, because I live there, I have had many opportunities to make pictures without having to travel.

DC: People used to say of your work, as it relates to Vancouver, that Vancouver looks like many places. That, somehow, the lack of specificity in Vancouver allowed you to make pictures that would resonate in different parts of the world. I don’t recall if you yourself have never said that though – do you think of Vancouver in that way?

JW: I lived in London for three years in the early ’70s when I was struggling to start my work as an artist again, and I had a very strong impression that I could not do it here – that there was something about the cityscape of London that just wasn’t going to do it for me, that I was somehow a West Coast person, a New World person. I don’t think there was any real reason to make that decision, but I did make it.
Now, I think that was totally wrong. I could have made all the pictures in London that I had made in Vancouver. It’s true Vancouver is more of a generic city than London and there is a certain advantage in that it could look like a lot of places. But it also looks like itself too. I tried to avoid the most likely features that a place might have, because I am still enough of a modernist to know that the conventional becomes uninteresting artistically, at least from some angle. And yet, the most conventional thing can be interesting if you look at it from another angle.

DC: Does that relate to what you mentioned at the beginning, about modernity having somehow compromised the pastoral? Modern development alienates us from nature, while at the same time the local and particular aspects of urbanism succumb to the generic and internationalised.

JW: I think old Europe is getting to the anti-pastoral stage. Look at all the new protests against tourism, for example. I don’t think it is just a North American thing anymore; it may have been 40 years ago, but mass tourism has changed Europe a lot. In North America we don’t have that same kind of mass tourism as a matter of fact.

DC: To come full circle, a few years ago, I sent you a link to a video recording of Walker Evans talking to Garry Winogrand’s students.

JW: Right, yes. From the ’70s.

DC: I sent it because I thought one thing Walker Evans said might pique your interest. It is the moment where a student asks Evans if he still goes to the movies a lot, as he used to write film reviews anonymously for Time magazine. He said, “Yes, I go a lot. She then asks, “What have you seen lately, and he says, “Well, I’ve seen two movies by Robert Altman – The Long Goodbye [1973] and McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]. Have you seen The Long Goodbye? It is a marvellous bunch of photography!” I didn’t say anything else in that email, and about two weeks later, you wrote a long reply saying you would never have imagined coming across Walker Evans saying this. Evans understood that all cinematography was photography – that anything we do to make a movie we could do to make a photograph.

JW: Somehow, I don’t think it is that surprising anymore because artists who are re-attuned to the ‘goodness’ of their work are going to recognise it everywhere. Clement Greenberg once said that the good art of wildly disparate periods resembles each other, more than good art resembles the bad or less good art of the same period. It’s probably not exactly true, but it is an interesting thought. What it does resemble is the ‘goodness’, so Evans would recognise the qualities he was looking for in photography as something that Altman’s cinematographers also achieved.

DC: Those two films were shot by Vilmos Zsigmond.

JW: Who was very good. Zsigmond would probably not have worried about the distinctions between categories of the cinematographic, the documentary, and so on. Evans was the person who really put documentary photography into brackets by calling it a style, and that part doesn’t surprise me. I was, however, surprised to hear him say that there was a way to take the cinematographic technique and detach it from the cinema. He realised that the same approach could lead to different art forms.
Watching images in the cinema has no scale. Whereas a picture – and I refer to the tableau as an emphatic form of picture-making here – places an emphasis on itself. You look at it as much as you look at what it shows you. You register its presence and its formal qualities. Cinematography doesn’t only mean cinema, it is also a way of practising photography – of looking, of thinking about it again. It does not really surprise me that someone who was so accomplished – not only at making photographs, but talking and writing about them – should recognise that fact. I think that photography, from its very beginnings, had these affinities.
But now, I want to make a little aside about writing. In the early ’70s, I did think that I would make films, after that period of being very uncertain about what I would do. I did write some scenarios, and I even went to Hollywood and met people who liked them but knew I would never be able to carry them through. What I learned from paying a lot of attention to films in the ’60s and ’70s was that there was a writing inside of the image, inside of image-making, hard as it is to define. Some people outside theatre and cinema write up whole scenarios when they are trying to make pictures. But it is not called a scenario, it is a writing – a writing that does not take the form of writing.
Let us take the tattooed people in Tattoos and Shadows [2000], for instance. Maybe this is not a good example because this is something I actually saw so I didn’t have to write it, but anyway. “Tattooed people: the tattoo is permanent, and the shadows are fleeting…” That was the starting point. Another example would be the resemblance between two people just as we talked about. The key word is ‘resemblance’; they resemble each other but they don’t look like each other. Let us say that is the writing or literary content. It’s all there, even if it is never written down. To then make the picture is to erase the writing; I see my pictures as erasures of writing. Perhaps erasure has a similar relation to writing as not-photographing has to photographing. My procedure is kind of upside-down-backwards, but it works for me.
My real writing work – aside from the essays I have written – are the titles of my pictures. I take a lot of time or pay a lot of attention to them. Sometimes they are good and sometimes they are not that good. I think ‘Tattoos and Shadows’ is pretty good – it just tells you exactly what it is. What I find is that people often forget the titles of my pictures when they mention them to me. They always say, you know the picture with… but can’t remember the title. I see that as a good thing, because if I have erased the narrativity then the viewer must be writing it.

DC: Something does get re-inscribed with the titling. Thinking about it now, all your pictures have titles. You have never gone for ‘untitled’.

JW: That’s right. That has never worked. As I said, there are no rules, so there could always be an untitled picture, but it just hasn’t happened.

DC: I have a last, maybe obvious, question: why photography? I have heard you talk about a commitment to painting when you were young, and then you were involved in that conceptual moment which was quite anti-pictorial. You finally commit – if that’s the right word – to photography, at an age when most photographers of the prior century had already done their best work. You came to it a little bit late, in your early 30s. Obviously, photography has meant a great deal to you, but it wasn’t the case very early on…

JW: I was always drawing and painting as a child and now, when I look back on it, I had a detail-oriented eye. That must have had to do with my sensibility shifting to photography at some point. I first got excited about photography in the context of conceptual art, because it was different and exciting at that point in time, but the truth is, I have no idea. But I also know that if I had really wanted to be a painter instead, I would be.

Let me say one thing about the big painting that appears in the photograph Recovery [2017–18]. I made that painting to express the inner vision of this young man who had happily recovered from some, hopefully, passing affliction. For whatever reason, I wanted to realise his hallucination of the ‘beautifulness’ of the world in this way, because once you have recovered from something like that, all is well, at least for a second. I wanted to capture that because I knew that everybody could relate to it, and I related to it. There are any number of ways to go about creating a hallucinatory image, but somehow, it needed to be this painting that recalled the pastoral paintings of the early 20th century, like Matisse. I had to design the painting as if it were the thing that he was experiencing. People said, you are finally going back to painting. And while it is interesting that they should say that, the fact is the painting was of no more interest to me than, say, the construction I had to do to build the grave in The Flooded Grave [1998–2000], or the man’s room in After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue [1999–2001]. It was just another construction that I had to make. The only thing I can say is that if I ever were going to paint, I wouldn’t paint like that. That was not what it was for.