Jeff Wall: Photographs

Trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall has been working for over 25 years on his expansive light boxes of staged scenes. These backlit photographic transparencies are set in cases generally associated with advertising display; but, instead of advertisements, Wall fills them with moments of everyday life that usually go unacknowledged: workers restoring a historic building, a janitor mopping a floor, a kitchen flooded with sunlight, the side of a house in the prairies. Carefully staged and meticulously composed, often over and over again until the perfect image has been achieved, Wall's images have explored a wide range of social and political themes, including urban violence, racism, poverty, gender and class conflicts, history, memory, and representation. Like the great French realist painters of the 19th century, Wall is, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, "a painter of modern life."

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Steidl/Hasselblad Center

After his earlier series on leisure time and the world of office labor, Lars Tunbjörk returned to his childhood neighborhood to photograph his mother's house. The experience intrigued him, and he continued shooting in similar areas around Sweden. Saturated with other people's personal memories, his photographs convey the peculiar atmosphere of silence familiar in middle-class housing districts, not only in Sweden but in other countries as well. If on the surface his images purport to investigate the private domestic realm in terms of architecture, home decorating styles, and garden culture, as seen in Sweden during the latest two decades, under these multiple, quiet surfaces they reveal apocalyptically more. Home is the final book in a trilogy, following Country beside Itself and Office.

Lars Tunbjörk: Home

Odbratt, Göran

Individual Artists

Malick Sidibé documented an important period of West African history with great commitment, enthusiasm and insight, focusing on Malian youth in the 1950s and 60s. His portraits and documentary photography captured the unique atmosphere and vitality of an African capital in a period of great euphoria. From the earliest days of the postcolonial period, Sidibé was a privileged witness to a period of tremendous, euphoric cultural change. As a young but well thought-of photographer, he captured a time of paradigm shift and youthful insouciance with a healthy curiosity about the rest of the world, and a valiant sense of pride and confidence in the future. Sidibé learned the basic skills of studio photography as an apprentice before he began making reportage photographs. Since then, he has been devoted to photography. His portraits and documentary photographs, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, now bear witness to the cultural and social development of post-colonial Mali. We see joy, hope, beauty and power in these psychologically captivating images. Sidibé's work, originally intended for an African audience, is a unique memoir and testimony for a world audience.

Malick Sidibé: Photographs

Diawara, Manthia

Knape, Gunilla

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Books by Steidl/Hasselblad Center