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?
I found Wall's photography to be a great place to locate a fisure between what we think of as "reality" and its other side. I think his work gives us a very nice way to start to think about the seductiveness and the illusion involved in vision and also the ways that vision, which we conceptualize as delivering the Truth is subject to subversion "behind our backs and in front of our eyes"...
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