SVERRE STRANDBERG ON JEFF WALL

Jeff Wall, Milk, 1984.

Afterimage by Sverre Strandberg:

It is in a way a hard task to think about just one image as how I relate to photography has changed. The idea of the singular image is not on my mind these days. I think of images in a series, in a context of more images. I am no longer seeking the one glorious photograph as I used to do.

There is one very well-known work on my mind though, Milk by Jeff Wall. It is a bit scary to talk about such a known image, from a time when the formats were huge, in the 80s, with him and Gursky, Ruff, and the others.

This one stuck with me. I had started art academy working with film, and then, in my final year, I flipped through different photobooks and there it was. It sort of beat everything else in a way. Looking at it again for this, it has this composition where everything goes together, and the frozen moment of the liquid, something only photography can do. And the fundamental symbolism of milk for all humans. Milk emerged as a recurring theme in contemporary photography from the early 1960s through the 1980s.

There is something about the modernist house, the architecture, the building filling most of the picture frame. And then this figure outside. There is some realism in the photograph, and yet it is a constructed scenography. I like this dualism between realism and the constructed, where you intervene in something which is realistic.

One can choose many different details in this one. The milk being in a paper bag, for one, hidden from view, and the one holding it looking in the other direction. Turning away from the explosion. One can see the veins in his arm. It makes me think that he is holding something back, something that is about to burst out, much like the splash of milk.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column originated in the inaugural issue of the Objektiv journal and continues today here on our web journal.