Celebrate the feeling unknown

Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, (C) 1992, the artist.

Jeff Wall, The Destroyed Room, transparency in lightbox, (c) 1978, the artist.

"The beauty of an image derives in part from the fact we never know exactly what we are feeling when we look at it"

-JEFF WALL

 I first encountered Wall's Dead Troops Talk,  probably around 9 years of age. At the time I can remember being awestruck by the scale of the piece, for a photograph. It's scale and detail does something to the image it makes it huge like a movie screen, but also fantastic by the subject matter in both its gore and humor. So in one image we're slammed with this cinematic quality, that really demands us, the viewer to really sort out some serious questions. By virtue of the medium we feel like we're looking at a real event, a larger than life National Geographic image. Its authenticity is a farce of course, by the soldiers calmly relaxing as if the camera had stopped rolling, and the director had yelled cut. 

How do these images assault our expectations for photographs?  

How do they reward our minds curiosity and necessity for constructing narratives and logic/order to phenomena?

The Epic of Strangeness

Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Evidence, 50 found photographs, 1977

In the Early 1970's armed with a government grant , San Francisco artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan created the series called Evidence. Or rather, they found it and compiled it. They, long with their government grant letter of introduction sifted through some 40,000 images at various government agencies at both federal and national levels. These images were originally gathered as a series of images for evidence of crimes, experiments and government research. From this massive pile, Sultan and Mandel selected 50, and exhibited them in 1977 in an exhibition called Evidence.

These images, when stripped of their original context, take on strangeness unparalleled. These seem to constitute the visual event, one where we that audience are placed into a mire of confusion and bewilderment, that our minds must find new structures to make sense of them, and this is the experience of the visual event.