Photography and Cinema

over in favour of their staged reconstruction. This staging could be

avowedly faithful, or less so. Several things follow from this. While

Wall’s photographs still describe the real world, they are shifted into the

register of semi-fiction. The documentary function of the medium is

partially suspended and the camera as witness is replaced by pictorial

hypothesis: ‘This was’ gives way to ‘What if this was?’ In traditional

documentary practice the subjects are photographed in their continuous

relationship with the world they inhabit. To stage an image is to rupture

that continuum, producing a photograph as imaginary as it is lucid.

(This perhaps is the only distinction we can make between a documen-

tary photograph that is ‘taken’ and one that is ‘made’, although it can

never be absolute).Mimic( 1982 ) was Wall’s first image staged outdoors.

He had witnessed a casually racist gesture in the street and decided to

re-enact it for a photograph. A white man and girlfriend are walking

slightly behind an Asian man. On the edge of each other’s fields of vision

the white man makes a loaded gesture as his middle finger pushes back

his eyelid. Wall selected the street and the players, rehearsing the scene

before shooting it. Achieving convincing narrative gestures in photo-

graphs is notoriously difficult. Wall has tried everything from paying

people to perform things over and over for long periods before attempting

to shoot, to filming rehearsals on video then freeze-framing the ideal

gestures and replicating them on location.^21 The title ‘Mimic’ can be read

at any number of levels: photography as a ‘mirror of nature’ mimics the

world; photography mimics film; the white man mimics the Asian man;

models mimic actors who mimic real people; Wall mimics the event he

saw; the central gesture is a depiction of the unthinking mimicry of a

reactionary ideology; and for the gallery the image is printed very large,

mimicking the scale of the viewer’s own body. Wall has pursued levels of

clarity and precision beyond what we usually see in reportage or street

photography. He uses a large-format camera that can record scenes in

great detail but is slow to use.Mimiccould only have been staged, not just

because of the detail but also because of the point of view. The camera

sees everything that is important here, in focus and without blur.

Moreover, the three people act as if the photographer and his bulky

equipment were not there right in front of them. Such disavowal of the 137