Jeff Wall has a reputation for being a meticulous, extremely precise artist who often takes a great deal of time for his staged photographs, preparing, correcting, shooting and reworking them, often for weeks, until you can no longer see any of the preparatory work. As a result, his pictures may appear to be taken from real life, but on closer inspection they turn out to be constructed and arranged illusory realities. He often works on a picture for weeks - talking about the preparatory work for the picture "The Invisible Man", which he created in 2002, Wall says that it took him two hours to read Ralph Ellison's book, but that it took months of thinking and planning from the idea for the picture to its realisation. The practical realisation then even took a year, during which the basement of the scene had to be developed and recreated in detail in the studio.
Perhaps also because of this focus on every detail, Jeff Wall has only published a good 170 photographic works in his artistic career, which has now spanned four decades and which, as Wall himself succinctly states, do not show the enormous effort involved.
______________________________
Literature on Jeff Wall:
Martin Schwander: "Jeff Wall", Fonadation Beyeler, Basel, 2024. (https://amzn.to/47CPX9M)
Valérie Hammerbacher: "Jenseits der Fotografie: Arrangement, Tableau und Schilderung - Bildstrategien in den Arbeiten von Jeff Wall", VDG Weimar, 2010. (https://amzn.to/3vxJb86)
Gregor Stemmrich (ed.): "Jeff Wall - Szenarien im Bildraum der Wirklichkeit. Essays and Interviews.", Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg, 2008. (https://amzn.to/3HDcB7L)
______________________________
All photographs by Jeff Wall: © Jeff Wall

Video clips from:
Art21: "Jeff Wall in Vancouver - Season 8" (   • Jeff Wall in "Vancouver" - Season 8 |...  )
PBS Newshour: "How photographer Jeff Wall's pictures duplicate 'magic' of large-scale paintings" (   • How photographer Jeff Wall’s pictures...  )
Nowness: "Photographers in Focus: Jeff Wall" (   • Photographers in Focus: Jeff Wall  )