Cinematography:

Staged photographs that require sets, actors, costumes and the kind of techniques normally associated with film production.

Enlarge Image A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947
1990

Documentary:

Straight photographs of everyday things that the artist has observed. They often depict inanimate objects or overlooked spaces.

Enlarge Image Diagonal Composition
1993

Near Documentary:

These pictures may be reconstructions of events that Wall has witnessed or they may be documentary photographs that involved a small degree of intervention by the artist. The resulting pictures occupy a middle ground between fiction and documentary.

Enlarge Image Man in Street
1995

Storyteller:

Many of Wall’s pictures feature someone speaking, a presence that implies a recounting of a story or a subjective experience in contrast to the silence of the photograph.

Enlarge Image The Storyteller
1986

Light-box:

A construction, often used for advertising purposes, of an photographic image mounted in a metal-edged box with florescent tube lighting behind it to lend it a hyper-real glow. Wall’s colour photographs are transparencies mounted in light-boxes.

Enlarge Image Examples of Jeff Wall’s colour transparencies
mounted in light-boxes

Montage:

Since 1991, Wall has created many of his photographs with the aid of digital montage. This technique involves using a computer to assemble separate photographs into a single, coherent picture.

Enlarge Image A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)
1993