Jeff Wall: Picture for Women

<p>Jeff Wall’s <em>Picture for Women</em> (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. In the photograph a woman looks outward, as if at the viewer; a camera occupies the centre of the image; the photographer stands on the right. Modelled on Édouard Manet’s painting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Picture for Women is an ambitious attempt to relate the artistic and spectatorial demands of the late 1970s to modernist pictorial art.</p> <p>In this book, David Campany offers an account of Wall’s move from a Conceptual approach to a reengagement with the idea of a singular (rather than serial) picture. Contrasting Wall’s idea of the photograph as a tableau or a‘picture’ with the works of the Pictures Generation – including Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Jack Goldstein – this book argues that Picture for Women is inseparable from the modern fate of the picture in general.</p>