Inspiration /reflection :::: Jeff Wall

Years ago, when I just had arrived to the Netherlands in 1995, I started to make Rotterdam's cultural facilities part of my own itinerary of the city.
I used to have lot of e-mail contact through atarraya, an internet mailing list of venezuelan abroad. I got an e-mail with the suggestion to take a look at an exhibition of Mathew Barney at Museum Boimans van Beuningen.
Apart from the fantastic visions and videos of Barney, I got to see a light panel from Jeff Wall, a canadian photographer and artist.
I'm still impressed. Because the picture was a reflection about reality and fiction, about public interest and news, and it has some kind of perverse idea of playing with history and our conventions.
It's called "dead troops walk" (see more at
this link) and depicts a "A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Mogor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986". I always thought that it was premonitory, looking at the events today when we have get accustommed to pain or the pain of others, when casualty counts seem to beless grave than one should expect.
Later I took some time to know more about Jeff Wall, and so I came across more of its work in Kassel, during Documenta 10 and Documenta 11. I bought a book about his work. Much later I went to New York in 2001 and had another encounter with photo art, by coincidence we went to MoMA and catch the famous Andreas Gursky exhibition...
Labels: jeff wall, Rotterdam