The Crooked Path

Jeff Wall's stage-set manipulation of reality poses interesting and sometimes troubling questions about the nature of our perception of reality and the conventions of picture making. Wall's Poussin-like composing of 'model' figures acting out a scene in order to illustrate part of a story or a drama taken from real life, brings home the troubling ambiguity inherent in all that we see. When there are no figures present in his work, as in The Crooked Path of 1991, this ambiguity, though less immediately apparent, is more disquieting.

Representing only an empty suburban wasteland in Vancouver, The Crooked Path is notable for the complete emptiness it portrays. There is a concentrated absence within this nondescript and boring scene of anything conventionally striking, dramatic or picturesque. And this emptiness - the emptiness of the wasteland, of the bland featureless sky-line and its grubby urban scrubland dissolving into a horizon of factory storerooms, lorries and telephone pylons - is reiterated by the emptiness of the wasteland sprawling to the foot of the viewer. The protagonist of this desolate scene is the 'crooked path' of the title, a linear and ghostly mark of absent presence that snakes its way through the centre of the photograph. A physical echo of the footsteps of all the people who have walked this way before but who, like everything else in the picture are now absent, it carves the emptiness of this hyper-real scene in two: a linear trace of a life that is elsewhere.