After 'Landscape Manual'

Jeff Wall

In 1969-1970, Jeff Wall produced a booklet entitled Landscape Manual: a montage of text and images chronicling his exploration, by car, of the Vancouver metropolitan area. He set out both to describe urban sprawl and to transpose his experience of it onto the page space: “The road-landscape exists, then, as a region of primary involvement, carried to the page with real, primary words and actual chemical photographs”.

The brochure was Jeff Wall’s contribution to the “Four Artists” exhibition at the Fine Arts Gallery, University of British Columbia, in February 1970. At the time, he was still an art and art history student, and had been taking part in group shows since the previous year, in the context of the so-called “conceptual art” movement. Landscape Manual is indeed reminiscent of Dan Graham's Homes for America (1966-1967) and Robert Smithson's A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967).

After obtaining his Master's degree in 1970, Jeff Wall suspended his artistic activity to study art history in Europe. He went back to photography in 1976, though from a completely different perspective, after returning to Vancouver where he taught at the university.

In 2003, he produced a small, autonomous black-and-white print after one of the snapshots from Landscape Manual. The car, which in North America became the symbol of individual mobility earlier than anywhere else, has also been since the 1940s the vehicle for a cinematic and cinematographic vision of the urban environment. By 1970, it was the new mobile optical apparatus of the Baudelairean “flâneur”. Jeff Wall has always travelled extensively in Vancouver, and still locates sites from his car.