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.

Beautiful Things In Whitechapel

Last night artslondon went to the Whitechapel Art Gallery for the preview of a new exhibition by photographer Nick Waplington which runs until 20 January 2008. We were very impressed with what we saw and it's always nice when the highlight of these things is the art itself rather than the free booze.

Waplington has released much of his work in book form and has always taken a particular interest in documenting his patch of East London where he lives. But this exhibition is something rather different. It's actually more of an installation than a straightforward photography exhibition.The main part takes place in the gallery's cinema/auditorium. A slide projector shows a range of 1000 photographs. Each is displayed for about ten seconds before the projector progresses to the next one. In the background there is an audio feed from a US radio station where they discuss business issues and economic theory from a pro-capitalist perspective. Meanwhile we see a collection of photos which Waplington has sourced from the internet.

All the photos are taken by soldiers and predominantly focus on the Middle East. We see Russian soldiers making brotherly poses in Afghanistan and then American soldiers doing the same thing twenty years later. Meanwhile, many of the images are mundane in their focus. They veer from friend to friend, relative to relative, with nothing to link each image to the next apart from the sheer human factor that they were taken by hired killers.

What's interesting is that despite the seemingly random, fractured nature of the images, your brain naturally orders them into some kind of logic. Patterns emerge, agendas reveal themselves but what those agendas are is very much left to you, the viewer. It's quite an experience but really needs to be viewed without distractions and with time to spare.

Meanwhile, in the foyer, a number of books of Waplington's work are also laid out. We didn't have time to examine these in as much detail as they deserve but we're told that they have more of a suggested narrative than the projected images. Those we saw focused more deeply on war and the different landscapes of the Middle East as well as the more common day to day reality of small town America which so many US soldiers call home.

The exhibition is also spread out all around this corner of East London. Images can be found displayed in a range of East End venues from the Rough Trade East shop to the Brick Lane Beigel Bakery.

Meanwhile, it's probably worth mentioning that we love Whitechapel Gallery. Sure it contains the predictable hordes of East London tossers, there to pose and not much more, but enthusiasm and personality just ooze from every slab. They display posters of successful past exhibitions in the same way that say, the Dublin Castle shows photos of Blur playing in their youth. And the gallery has a flexibility that allows a true variety of exhibitions and an exciting range of talks and events which we will be bringing you more information about in the coming months.

Oh-and if you're wondering why this entry is formatted so badly, it's because Blogger is rubbish and we can't be bothered to learn html. Sorry.