Interpreting the Old Masters

Thinking about the works of Tom Hunter and Jeff Wall

Page two

A Sudden Gust of Wind

(C) Jeff Wall 1993 All rights acknowledged

Katsushika Hokusai

"This work is one of Wall's earliest digital montages. It refers directly to a woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Wall transposes the nineteenth-century Japanese scene to a contemporary cranberry farm near Vancouver. Amateur actors play the odd assortment of rural and city characters, surprised by the forces of nature. It required over 100 photographs, taken over the course of more than a year, to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time." Exhibition Guide, Tate Modern.

This piece demonstrates how Wall uses digital manipulation techniques to present realistic scenes, unlike the more surreal Dead Troops Talk (1992) which is clearly a fantasy image. At first glance, A Sudden Gust of Wind looks like a remarkable grabshot - a superb piece of timing which captures a moment of total disarray. It is with some disappointment, then that the work is in fact a composite of many different images, and what's more, that the action was carefully staged rather than captured from life. This is a feature of Wall's work which, whilst technically admirable, has (for me, at least) a negative effect on the way the image is received. By taking 'seen incidents' and reconstructing them with actors specifically for the camera, all spontaneity is removed and the photograph becomes representation rather than reportage - a form of pseudo-documentary.

Wall calls these images 'cinematographic photographs'. He defends his technique by saying that such photographs can convey messages which would otherwise have been lost; an example being Mimic (1992) in which an incidence of racial intolerance seen on a Vancouver street was re-enacted for the camera. This writer can't help feeling that capturing the actual incident as a candid street photograph would have had much more impact than a carefully staged reconstruction.

Click here for more on Tom Hunter.

URLs

Tate Modern

National Gallery

Hackney Gazette

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