footnote 4 More recently, Wall has been taken as the major, and paradigmatic, figure of Michael Fried’s attempt to refashion the discussion of museum photography in the light of the themes that have sustained his writings since the 1960s: theatricality and absorption. He has received sympathetic treatment from such figures as Hans Belting, Jean-François Chevrier and Michael Newman. In a special issue of Art History about ‘Photography after Conceptual Art’, no fewer than three of the ten articles carried substantial discussions of Wall. An entire number of the Oxford Art Journal was devoted solely to its examination. footnote 3 But what is striking is not merely the production of the standard literature that would surround the reputation of any successful artist, but the degree to which his work attracts academic attention. His largest retrospective yet was held in 2005 in the vast spaces of the Schaulager, Basel, and was followed by a sequence of exhibitions in premier art spaces around the world (including mo ma, Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Guggenheim Berlin), and the publication of a catalogue raisonné of his photographic work to date, along with a collection of his writings. Wall, born in 1946, is one of the most prominent photographic artists on the contemporary art scene, and indeed one of the most successful artists working in any medium.
This extraordinary development raises various questions: what has the museum done to photography in this accommodation (as well as vice versa)? footnote 2 How has it been framed, literally and conceptually? What are its viewers encouraged to think about it, and how? Has there emerged a form of photography, distinct from the mass of photographic production, that it is worth calling ‘museum photography’? One way to get a hold on these questions is to examine the remarkable career of Jeff Wall. The defence of photographic work in criticism and art history has acquired much of the portentousness and high seriousness that were once reserved for painting. footnote 1 What had been a marginalized, minor and irregularly seen medium has become one of the major staples of museum display, and has taken its place alongside painting in terms of scale, sophistication and expense. T he status of photography in the museum has changed radically over the last twenty years.
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