ABSTRACT
The introduction will give an overview of the book, the chapters, and the key issue that drives the narrative: how Wall’s project functions as a critical investigation of (what he refers to as) the ‘Western Concept of the Picture’. I began this book with a prologue consisting of a personal recollection of the unexpected and powerful encounter with one of Wall’s photographs in a gallery that led me to focus on Wall in my PhD research, which then led to the publication of this book. Personal recollections of encounters with Wall’s art will be employed throughout this book as a framing device for the discussion of key works. These personal recollections represent an engagement with a key argument posed by Michael Fried in his highly influential book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). Fried argues that the relationship between the photograph and the viewer standing before it is central to the ‘new regime’ of art photography that has emerged since the late 1970s, to which Wall has made a resounding contribution. My use of personal reflections applies and extends on Fried’s idea by creating a narrative about the transformative power of such encounters. My approach could be described as putting theory into practice, and framing scholarship through real world ‘close encounters’ with art. The close personal encounters are a reminder to the reader of the materiality and spectacle of the life-scale photographs – something that can be easily forgotten when highly detailed enormous photographs are reproduced in a book or on a screen.
