Off the Wall

The photographs of Jeff Wall usually have all the appearance of spontaneous simplicity.

But it's a simplicity that's hard won. One of his most famous photographs, A Sudden Gust of Wind (his 1993 updating of a 19th-century Hokusai woodblock print featuring four men in a field chasing a trail of office papers spiralling sky-high), was in fact a complex, digitally manipulated montage, but one that was so seamlessly executed that it looked like a fortuitous snapshot.

To further play with concepts of realism and illusion, the Canadian photographer mounts his huge colour transparencies in light-boxes. This ensures they resemble film stills rather more than still photographs.

However, his latest colour light-box images are described as straightforward documentary photographs and, rather than plundering art history, their subject matter appears suitably modest: an ordinary Vancouver street featuring a building about to be gutted; a clapboard church on a snowy day; and, more cinematically, a group of jovial women preparing dead chickens for market. Aside from this last image, if they are at all arresting, it appears to be for their size and luminosity alone.

Downstairs are large-scale black and white prints that also deal in 'the poetry of the ordinary'. Coldly beautiful and stark, they are also inevitably a little dull.

Until Jan 19, White Cube, 25 Mason's Yard SW1, Tue to Sat 10am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7930 5373. Tube: Piccadilly Circus

Jeff Wall
White Cube At Mason's Yard
Mason's Yard, SW1Y 6BU