Jeff Wall/Uta Barth

As an assignment for one of my photography classes, we were asked to check out two art books a week from my University's wonderful book collection. Previously, I checked out books by Francis Alÿs and Jean-Luc Vilmouth. This week I found books by Jeff Wall and Uta Barth.

Jeff Wall is a Canadian photographer. Much of Wall's artwork consist of elaborate tableaux ranging from the mundane to referential of famous artworks. Wall refers to his works as 'prose poetry.' Something that I agree upon. His photographs capture that instance. Whatever happened before and after the photo doesn't matter.

A Sudden Gust of Wind, 1993

In this photograph, Wall recreate's Katsushika Hokusai's Yejiri Station, Province of Suruga, ca. 1832. Wall recalls the process of making this photo:

"When I was making A Sudden Gust of Wind I knew I wanted to show how the air would carry the papers. Hokusai had already solved some of those problems. If you analyze his composition, you realize that many of the little pieces of paper coincided with very important points on the rectangle. He composed something that had a feel of the accidental. It was not accidental, but he knew how to make it look that way. I thought that the only way to achieve that was to first create chance situations, to create a lot of movement and then just have a lot of material to edit. So we created a way a lot of paper could be moved in air and then tried to think of both the rectangle and the invisible air current in three dimensions. As the papers move in depth, they move away from us and get smaller. I just worked hard on it and tried to compose. There is no guide, it's just a feeling, a sense of the real, how things really are or would be."

Los Angeles based artist Uta Barth examines photographic visual perception. She is interested in "how the human eye sees differently from the camera lens and how the incidental and atmospheric can become subject matter in and of themselves."

Untitled (aot 4) from ...and of time, 2000

In her book, ...and of time, Barth observes light as it tracks across a room, as it bounces off the walls and different objects in the space. It's quite poetic. There something meditative about observing something like light as it moves across a plane.