Getting Jeff Wall's The Destroyed Room for this assignment was a bit odd, because essentially I was doing a recreation of a recreation. In much of his early work, Jeff Wall would take any images, not just photographs, and try to reconstruct them in a way that reflected himself in them. Wall's jumping off point was a 19th-century oil painting by Eugene Delacroix, titled Death of Sardanapalus. The painting itself depicts an Assyrian king whose fortress is under attack. When defeat seems certain, Sardanapalus orders all his belongings destroyed and his concubines murdered to strip the pleasure of doing so by his enemies. In his reaction, Wall developed a modern room in the aftermath of destruction, insinuating perhaps a domestic dispute similar to the one told by Delacroix.
In my recreation, I wanted to combine certain aspects of both these pieces as a nob to Wall's process. I set up an abstract, destroyed, although it is much vaguer than the one Jeff Wall set up. Rather than just shoot the set-up forever, I wanted to add a destroyed person, a mirror of Sardanapalus's concubines. She is in fear, perhaps as an escapee of the massacre, or simply knows what is about to come. I'd prefer the photo to be viewed as an aftermath, but the set-up may be too vague to push it in a certain direction.
Compositionally, I tried to match Wall's use of the color red and harsh diagonals, which are shared in Delacroix's painting as well. This way, even if the photograph is viewed as an aftermath, these aspects still manage to add a feeling of ongoing violence and tension. If I could reshoot, I'd like to find a red building to block out the background.
I by know means think that my photograph is a worthy recreation of Jeff Wall's piece, and in my research I found an interesting reaction about his own piece: "I know that in some ways this is a very artificial way of going about things, very manneristic even, but it was a way to begin, and I had to begin."
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