
Jeff Wall
There is a figure in Jeff Wall’s light-box photograph, The Old Prison, 1987, that is easy to miss. In reproductions, he is barely visible, lost in the long and protracted expansiveness of the panorama. Viewing the work in person, one sees the man pop out of the picture, punctuating the landscape in his red sweater. He stands close to the abandoned structure with his back turned away from the camera, looking off into the distance. The man is what Germans call a Rückenfigur, or back figure, a Romantic symbol synonymous with the work of Caspar David Friedrich. But unlike Friedrich’s paintings,