In his staged situations based on everyday scenes, the Canadian artist Jeff Wall creates a subtle interplay between carefully selected settings and strongly defined figures. The aesthetic fascination that the back-lit transparencies have on the viewer is intensified by their striking brilliance. By looking carefully at Wall's works, however, layers of complex spatial, temporal and contextual issues emerge -- issues that reflect different aspects of our present-day reality. At first glance, the places, scenes and activities depicted in Wall's works look like snapshots, often taken from a distant perspective. Closer examination reveals that they are meticulously staged compositions. The artist incorporates figures within urban, rural or architectural contexts so that they become actors relating a story. The presence of one or more figures lends scenes a frequently mask-like appearance, often verging on the grotesque, and their activities, be they routine or unusual, become 'images of collective memories.' Book jacket.

Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1946. He has been working with large-format, back-lit transparencies mounted in light boxes since 1977. He sees himself as 'a painter of modern life,' creating an image of our times with contemporary technical means