Jeff Wall
[Photographer, b. 1946, Vancouver, Canada, lives in Vancouver.]

 Dragging its heavy burden of depiction, photography could not follow pure, or linguistic conceptualism all the way to the frontier. 
 Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but filling stations. (Referring to Ed Ruscha’s seminal 1963 book “Twentysix Gasoline Stations.”) 
 Photography cannot find alternatives to depiction, as could the other fine arts. It is in the physical nature of the medium to depict things. In order to participate in the kind of reflexivity made mandatory for modernist art, photography can put into play only its own necessary condition of being a depiction-which-constitutes-an-object. 
 In making a landscape we must withdraw a certain distance—far enough to detach ourselves from the immediate presence of other people (figures), but not so far as to lose the ability to distinguish them as agents in a social space. Or, more accurately, it is just at the point where we begin to lose sight of the figures as agents, that the landscape crystallizes as a genre. 
 I see [photography] as a kind of untheorisable medium, a kind of polymorphic, multivocal and multivalent construction. 
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