Jeff Wall’s invisible hand

By George Pendle

A pale, bearded man is taking a beating. Two surveyors are hammering flags into the ground in a fathomless desert. A homeless woman looks longingly at an occupied cardboard box. Each of these images is wildly different from the others but they all seem like moments plucked from a larger, as yet unknown narrative, like scenes from movies that have yet to be filmed.

The creator of these tableaux is Jeff Wall, arguably the greatest photographer alive today. His latest exhibition of new work – running concurrently in London and New York – shows why he is a master of the form. His photographs look like documentary snapshots taken on the fly, but in fact they are meticulously staged. The results are images that have the spontaneity of a Henri Cartier-Bresson street shot and the painterly complexity of a Caravaggio.