More Photos To Make You Swoon

Following on from the storming time which we had at the Whitechapel Gallery's Nick Waplington exhibition, we felt in the mood for even more photography. So when we read some more than positive reviews of Jeff Wall's new show at White Cube we knew we had to go and have a look.

Jeff Wall is a photographic artist who is primarily known for his blown up, back lit photos to which he applies some super complicated digital jiggery pokery to make them into highly arranged situations. In 2005 he had an all encompassing retrospective at Tate Modern which we attended and enjoyed very much. So we were very excited to see the new pieces which were on display.

White Cube's new West End gallery is approached down an alleyway off an extremely posh street between Pall Mall and Fortnum and Mason in one of the most well heeled areas of London. The exhibition contains three large scale back lit works, a smaller back lit piece and some of Wall's black and white photography which he has been doing since the early 1990s.

It's the full scale, back lit pieces which inevitably form the centrepiece of the exhibition. The way in which they are displayed makes them appear like billboard adverts, even if the subject matter is far from that of a Marlboro ad. The amount of work which Wall does to his photos always tends to give them a too good to be true shimmer where everything is just a little bit too high definition and perfectly lit.

The White Cube website has thumbnails of some of the photos on display so you can see what we're talking about. "Hotels" shows the gutting of an apartment building and is essentially a highly worked landscape of an urban building project. Like many of his photos, the view is intersected by the electricity cables which are recurrent in Wall's work and which divide his photos in much the same way as a viewfinder.

"Dressing Poultry" is a rather grim view of the inside of a poultry processing factory. Feathers lie everywhere as pasty American farmers perform icky acts to birds for human consumption. A pool of animal juices lies on the floor and the surroundings look far from sanitary. Each worker's pose is highly constructed and it's easy to see how Wall may have had to take hundreds of photographs of the scenario to come up with this final, far from improvised version. Effectively, this has the same level of artifice as a painting. Wall is not an artist who attempts to capture a unique moment in time.

Elsewhere in the exhibition he explores some desolate landscapes, particularly downstairs in his black and white works which are equally as impressive as the blockbuster technicolour photos upstairs. All his work just seems so bloody cold that it gave us the shivers. It's imperative for the GDP of Canada that he should never be signed up by the Vancouver tourist board.

A hugely impressive exhibition, perfect in length. It's enough to satisfy any existing fans of Wall and act as a good taster for anyone who hasn't seen his work before. Stretched over a full length exhibition in the Tate Modern, Wall couldn't quite justify the sheer quantity of his work on display. However, in a small gallery like this, his photos each get the level of scrutiny they need and the results are excellent. We also recommend Chequers, the tiny pub next door which is a great place to go afterwards. The exhibition runs until 19th January 2008.

N.B. The photos shown in this article are not the photos on display in the exhibition.