ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 – ‘The photographic condition’ – introduces the reader to Jeff Wall’s thinking about photography’s place in the history of art via a close reading of his essay “‘Marks of Indifference”: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art’ (1995). In this essay, Wall writes a history of photo-conceptualism that also establishes the context from which his own photography practice emerged. This chapter establishes Wall’s critical interest in (what he terms) the ‘Western Concept of the Picture’, that is, the unified classical type of picture governed by linear perspective. This chapter unpacks Wall’s arguments about how the temporal and technological nature of photography challenged traditional notions of pictorial representation, leading to the emergence of a new version of the ‘Western Concept of the Picture’. Yet even as photography challenged established notions of pictorial representation, it struggled to be accepted as an art form. Wall proposes that it was through the ‘artlessness’ of photo-conceptual experiments that photography finally emerged as ‘art’. These ideas are illustrated through a discussion of Wall’s own conceptual artwork Landscape Manual (1969–1970).
