Above is Jeff Wall’s “A Sudden Gust of Wind,” which I just saw at the MoMA. (I actually had this image in my collection of references because I found it interesting but didn’t know anything about it!)
Wall’s photos are often gigantic (some figures are life-sized) and they are cibachrome photographs, back-lit in a light box. This show was a perfect case study on the importance of seeing work in person because so much of that–the scale, the light–is lost in reproduction.
The photos are so large, in fact, that they have seams where two photos are put together to skirt around the technical limitations of the size that can be printed. Despite this logical explanation, I held firm to my belief that the seams were significant and I went from photo to photo seeing if the seams bisected the figures or if they separated figures from one another. I could have made a graph for you. Well, I read too much into that because I checked the catalog and the seams are all photoshopped out, meaning that they are just insignificant bystanders of the process. So, that is an introduction to my ignorance. How very embarrassing. And now an introduction to my naive alacrity to begin educating myself.