On display at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin: the photographs of Jeff Wall. Photography as a staging of reality.

from 9 October 2025 to 1 February 2026

a monographic exhibition on the photography of Jeff Wall

Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Tuninetti di Pertengo, Piazza San Carlo 81, Turin

Curator: David Campany

The Gallerie d’Italia are a network of museums with locations in Turin, Milan, Naples and Vicenza, housed in prestigious historic buildings in the heart of the cities. They hold permanent collections and present consistently interesting exhibitions.

The retrospective Jeff Wall. Photographs at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, curated by the London critic David Campany, offers a selection of 27 exhibited works spanning over forty years of practice.

Jeff Wall, born in Vancouver in 1946, a leading figure at Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York and the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, met the public together with curator Campany as part of the exhibition’s public programme: at the opening, at the in-depth discussion the following day, and at the book signing of the Allemandi-published catalogue.

The Turin exhibition confirms that Jeff Wall is a point of reference highlighting the boundary between narration and vision, between truth and artifice. His practice is also a strategy for bringing contemporary political and social themes to light: racism and white supremacy, class differences, identity, war and poverty.

The exhibition path shows how Wall’s photography is always the result of a meticulous and prolonged process of composition. Wall defines his photographic method as “cinematography”. Similar to the process of making a film, his work depends on collaboration with a cast and assistants who help him develop his carefully constructed scenarios. He uses a large-format camera with a telephoto lens to achieve the high resolution and fine detail that characterise his prints. He borrows from the advertising language the technical device of the lightbox (the Canadian photographer began using lightboxes after seeing them in advertising at the end of the 1970s), which creates a clear light and emphasises the “staged” effect. The artist’s photographs, often constructed in the studio like a film set, transform photography into an object to be contemplated as an autonomous work of art.Both the black and white and colour prints express the dual register of Wall’s work: on the one hand, the “quasi-documentary” quality of everyday scenes, and on the other, the meticulous construction of tableaux drawing on painting, cinema and literature.

Wall presents his images at life-size, exerting a magnetic fascination over viewers. He also constructs photographs by referencing masterpieces of art (Hokusai, Manet, Delacroix). On display is The Thinker, a reinterpretation of Auguste Rodin.

At first glance, his works appear enigmatic; one must delve into his narrative and background to fully appreciate the beauty of his photographs.

After “Invisible Man”, inspired by the novel by Ralph Ellison (1999–2000)

Among the works on display, the photograph that struck me most is After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue, which demonstrates Wall’s ability to translate literary material into a powerful visual experience.Jeff Wall says something passionate, which helps us to understand his work and art: “While I’m reading a book, a novel, I come across a passage that strikes me because it has the potential to be transformed into a photograph. I think of these moments as chance events that occur during reading, a bit like those that happen when I casually see something in reality. I don’t distinguish between different kinds of chance events. In any case, it begins with something that doesn’t have an immediate presence, that I haven’t seen happen — I’ve only read it. After “Invisible Man” represents an initial moment in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which was written and published around 1954, probably written during the Second World War and published some time later. It tells the story of a young Black American man who travels from the South to the North — many did so at the time to seek a better life without having to endure the conditions imposed on Black people in the American South. He experiences many adventures and misadventures, wonderfully written by someone who deeply understands what he is telling. At the end of the novel, after all his hardships, he accidentally ends up in a basement. He gets there during a riot; at that point in his life, he wants to escape from everything and remains in that cellar for a long time. In a way, he hides there because he finds a nook, an empty space. And then he begins to settle in and create a place for himself, a secret space, stealing electricity from the basement panels. He installs one light, then another, and can’t stop adding lights, most of which he salvages from discarded objects. Until he ends up with over 1,300 lights in his room. Completely irrational, as he admits. But he says it is never bright enough around him because he is aware of the invisibility in which he has lived from not being recognised. It has everything to do with his life. The whole novel centres on the lack of recognition and on the ways he reacts to it. This is told at the beginning of the novel, in the prologue, where we discover what is about to be read and where the room in which he is writing the book is described. When I read this passage, it seemed obvious, as you can imagine, that this could be an image: it talks about light and contains a kind of fantastical environment that one would never see — or at least it would be very rare. So I decided to make it, to give visibility to a moment of that story. It took a lot of work to create the imagined space; sometimes I have to work a great deal to make my photographs, as in this case, while other times I have to do very little — and I don’t believe that a lot of work means the photograph will be better, it just means making a certain kind of picture, and this one required all that effort. Everything in the image is the result of a careful reading of the text; no object you see there is by chance — they are all described by Ellison at some point in the story. If you’ve read the book, you’ll be able to identify some of them. One thing I’ve realised about the photographs I’ve made based on novels is that most people probably won’t read that book — it would be nice if they did, but I don’t think it will happen. I’ve had to accept that fact and understand that what I must do is make an image that can hopefully be as enjoyable as reading the book, and therefore detach it from its literary source, just as I’ve had to separate all the photos I’ve taken from their originating action and transform them into a static image, which is always suspended or removed from reality. So my photography is in some way autonomous, even though I would very much like you to read the novel!”

This large-format photographic “illustration” is printed on a transparency and mounted in a steel-framed lightbox, illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights.Wall takes the literary fragment as a starting point for a visual reworking that translates words into space, light and objects.It is interesting to note that creating images from stories (“illustrating”) was once the main activity of the visual arts. The growing modernist tradition relegated this practice to the margins; for much of the twentieth century, the term “illustration” was used pejoratively. In this large, detailed and deeply engaging photograph, Wall has practically reinvented this practice of “illustration”.

The reconstructed scene is a basement inhabited by a young African-American man intent on writing; the space (a basement in Harlem, on the edge of Manhattan) is full of furniture, clothes and a striking ceiling covered with hundreds and hundreds of lightbulbs. The photograph is at once faithful to the text and an autonomous rewriting of the narrative image. Wall worked on this piece for about a year, designing it as a cinematic reconstruction of the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. It is a colour transparency in a large lightbox (about 174 × 250 cm), created using his usual technique of printing on colour transparency film and backlighting. This work marks a turning point in his late 1990s practice, when Wall began intertwining literature and photography, shifting from the pure urban observation typical of the 1980s to narrative and symbolic reconstruction. Two elements are central to this photograph. First, the treatment of light: the 1,369 bulbs mentioned in Ellison’s prologue become in Wall a formal and symbolic device; the proliferation of light sources transforms the space into a film set interior, giving the image an almost hyperreal clarity and at the same time a claustrophobic, obsessive atmosphere. Light, which in the novel is related to identity, visibility and power, is here materialised, displayed, almost measured: Wall reveals the “mechanism” of seeing, making visibility itself the subject of the work. Another fascinating element is the relationship between literature and photography. Wall translates Ellison’s prologue with a director’s care and a craftsman’s attention: the scene is built in the studio, every object arranged to speak of the protagonist. The result is a kind of “indirect representation” of the narrative self: the absence of a recognisable face allows the mass of domestic effects and the abundance of artificial light to convey the condition of marginality, autonomy and rebellion that the novel presents. This image works well because it maintains the tension between textual fidelity and visual autonomy: neither a mere copy of the novel nor pure invention, but rather an “after” that amplifies the original meaning.

After "The Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison - The Prologue, photography by Jeff Wall (1999-2000)

The triptych The Gardens from the gardens of Villa Silvio Pellico, composed of three parts:

Complaint,

Denial,

Expulsion Order,

was created in the gardens of Villa Silvio Pellico in Moncalieri, a sumptuous private residence that Jeff Wall visited with his wife in 2017, attracted by the fame of the villa’s park, designed by the renowned English landscape gardener Russell Page, one of the most important garden architects of the twentieth century, known for his refined and “painterly” approach to landscape design, combining geometric rigour and naturalistic sensitivity. Page worked on the villa in the 1950s, designing an Italian-style garden reinterpreted with modern sensibility; hedges, paths, terraces and scenic viewpoints open towards the hilly landscape. This aspect is particularly interesting in relation to Jeff Wall: the triptych The Gardens dialogues not only with the human figures and relationships it represents but also with the scenographic, orderly structure of Page’s garden, which becomes a natural theatre for his images.

The order of the images (from left to right) tells a narrative progression. Here, the photographer’s hand focuses on a subtle dramaturgy of bodies and relationships: recurring figures, slight variations in posture and distance that build a story of private tensions. From a visual point of view, the refined triptych contrasts natural space and human presence with Wall’s calm yet sharp gaze: vegetation, pathways and plays of natural light serve as the backdrop for micro-dramas of human relations. The repetition of figures, doubles, almost echoes of the characters, adds a layer of perceptual ambiguity: we don’t know whether we are observing alternative perspectives on the same scene, in a play of duplication and difference typical of the photographer’s poetics, which combines documentary realism with the will to stage complex emotional scripts.

Visiting this retrospective and reading the captions or listening to the accompanying audio guide helps one to understand the artist and the art of photography as a complex form of thought and representation.

Opening hours: Tue, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun 9:30 – 19:30; Wed 9:30 – 20:30

Free admission on the first Sunday of the month