This publication Living, Working, Surviving accompanies the 2025/26 exhibition at the Fondazione MAST, Bologna.

Since the late 1970s, Jeff Wall has contributed significantly to establishing photography as an autonomous medium, and is regarded as one of the key vanguards of staged photography. His images resemble documentary photographs in style and manner, but indeed they are all meticulously composed and multilayered compositions. Synthesizing photography with elements from other art forms such as painting, cinema, and literature―in a complex mode that Jeff Wall calls “cinematography”―his deeply intellectual work stages fictional realities, memories and past experiences in an elaborate process.

The images in the publication, as well on display retrace the artist’s extraordinary career: they include lightboxes and large-format colour, as well as black-and-white prints, created between 1980 and 2021 and are dedicated to the broad spectrum of humanity, everyday life, and the simple gestures of those who work, move, and carry out daily tasks and activities. They appear to be candid snapshots of people’s lives, yet in reality, they are enigmatic and complex scenes depicting events that never occurred –indefinite and deliberately ambiguous compositions.

Wall’s images capture and condense the aspirations and contradictions of the Western world. He is an unrelenting observer of people’s habits and social interactions within urban and industrial contexts marked by economic and cultural contrasts. His interest extends equally to the condition of those on the margins of society and to that of the middle class.

Starting in 1978, Wall incorporated lightboxes into his artistic practice, making them a central element of his work for nearly thirty years—alongside large-format slides. From 1997, he added black-and-white photographs to his work:
"an antithesis to large-format slides, showing a world from which colour has suddenly vanished. Hallucinations of the disappearance of colour, which create a kind of shock”.
- Jeff Wall