It's October 3rd

I can read, so I read some things lately I've read an interview with Jeff Wall who is a photographer who took two years to produce one single image, "The Flooded Grave". Most of his photography has a sense of documentation and spontaneity, as if he is catching a beautiful moment or a strange moment and illuminating it to be a cinematic image. In reality he is putting an obsessive amount of work into stitching multiple sites and photos together to create a spontaneous looking site. This photo can be divided into three sections, the cemetery can be divided in two, while the hole in the ground dug from a grave is multiple shots that were taken in his studio with marine life specialists who helped create the perfect image. I love photography, but sometimes its hard to understand the technical means of creating the photograph. I love the way that this seems easy, but its not. The labor goes unnoticed without prior knowledge of the piece. It looks effortless. I thought this piece was worth sharing, it relates to my current struggle which is my cake painting. It is going by so slowly and I am not working on anything else right now, and if I continue to not work on anything else I'm going to lose my mind and only care about the cake. So I'm giving the cake a break so I can go back to my normal paintings. Poor Jeff Wall must have lost his mind thinking about the same thing everyday. 

He speaks really nicely about the process of making it, he seems really excited about making it rather than talking about the ideas behind it. He has these wonderful ideas about the versatility of a single image and how many realities it can contain.  A small snippet from the interview :

Jan Tumlir: Thomas Crow described your use of digital technology as opening up the "occult potential" of, I suppose, representation. How do you understand that word, "occult," in regard to what you're doing here?

Jeff Wall: I think it has to do with the fact that, before photography, the coexistence of separate domains in pictures was taken for granted. Paintings showed angels or demons interacting with humans, for example, as a routine matter, because it is routine within the nature of the medium. Painting and drawing make no demand as to the ontological consistency of the things being depicted; they don't have any means to do so, and that's one of the main reasons they've been so significant in the history of the imagination. Photography seemed to be something quite different, at the beginning; it seemed to prove that there was only one world, not many-one visible world, anyway. But I think that is only a suggestion made by photography, not a conclusion. And the suggestion can be taken in so many different ways. I think photography, by nature, does have artistically legitimate routes of access into the aesthetic of "multiple worlds," of "imaginary ontologies." 

Definitely worth a read if you get a chance.