New York/In the Land of Meta

Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal

It's a losing proposition writing anything about Jeff Wall at this point. The juggernaut of critical approbation along with Wall's own avalanche of supporting text is more than a puny photographer like me can withstand. I find myself standing on the corner of Houston and Sixth Avenue gazing up at the Jeff Wall billboard "Only at MoMA" and I feel weak and useless. Wall is a greater photographer than all others because his photographs aren't just photographs, but containers of the entire canon of western art. They were made in response to a crisis of conceptualism that stymied us all. Wall triumphed. The rest of us stumbled blindly in the street trying to find lost things, places, ideas, rather than reinventing the medium, turning the act of photography inside out, like he did, creating hermetically sealed environments of almost reality, hyperreality, staged reality, photographs about photography, frozen like the little explosion of milk referring to nothing and everything.