Focus on this artwork and analyze the Background.
Jeff Wall, born September 29, 1946, in Vancouver, is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early 1970s. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.Wall experimented with conceptual art while an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia. Wall then made no art until 1977, when he produced his first backlit phototransparencies. Many of these pictures are staged and refer to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation. The photographs' compositions often allude to historical artists like Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet, or to writers such as Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima, and Ralph Ellison.
Vancouver Vancouver School cibachrome Hokusai Jeff Wall Yukio Mishima University of British Columbia Rodney Graham Ralph Ellison Ian Wallace Franz Kafka Diego Velázquez Édouard Manet Ken Lum