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He had discovered art via the illustrated art books that his parents received on subscription. “I loved looking at Bruegel’s ‘Triumph of Death’ as a kid, all the skeletons and victims of the apocalypse. It was like a movie, better than a movie in a way.” Photography fascinated him, too. He admired the work of Walker Evans and Robert Frank but there was a sense that they had done all there was to be done.
“It seemed like those people had pretty much perfected that kind of photography – the small photograph of the real world, made somehow in the actual, and ending up in a book. It was the perfect form of reportage as art – and it seemed there was nowhere to go after them. I saw it as a closed door. It just wasn’t for me.”
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◇ Frieze Magazine | Archive | Jeff Wall
Probably Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death (c.1562), which I saw in an Abrams art book when I was ten years old.
