Jeff Wall
Taught Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others in one of my classes today. I’ve used this book before and each time I try to get my students to explain to me Sontag’s appreciation for Goya. There are a few pages from John Berger’s About Looking that I also find to be very useful; Berger is in dialogue with Sontag, trying to argue for a use of photography that brings it closer to “memory” than to “image.” (Berger writes: “There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be contructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.” What form will our academic writing take if we follow Berger’s injunction?) In the end, though, it is not an argument like Berger’s that Sontag is appealing for. Instead, it is the witty and parodic response of Jeff Wall’s that she favors. See above: Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) 1992. Sontag writes:
The antithesis of a document, the picture, a Cibachrome transparency seven and a half feet high and more than thirteen feet wide and mounted on a light box, shows figures posed in a landscape, a blasted hillside, that was constructed in the artist’s studio. Wall, who is Canadian, was never in Afghanistan. The ambush is a made-up event in a savage war that had been much in the news. Wall set at his task the imagining of war’s horror (he cites Goya as an inspiration), as in nineteeth-century history painting and other forms of history-as-spectacle that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries–just before the invention of the camera–such as tableaux vivants, wax displays, diaoramas, and panoramas, which made the past, especially the immediate past, seem astonishingly, disturbingly real.
The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic” but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk. Here they do.
