Response to blog prompt #4

This is a photograph taken by Jeff Wall entitled "After 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison." When I was in NYC a couple years ago Jeff Wall was having an exhibit at MOMA. I read an article about him in the New York Times and learned that he had sold his work for $1 million a print so I decided I needed to check his work out in person. His photographs are transparencies mounted on lightboxes, and huge (this one is 1740 mm by 2505 mm). In my opinion, Wall's work is work is interesting if you read about the meaning behind it, but not necessarily because the photographs themselves are intensely beautiful. In this case, Wall reconstructed the room that the main character from "Invisible Man" resides in. What makes the photograph interesting to me is the quote Wall used from the novel wherein Ellison's character proclaims "Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well." Ellison's premise for the novel is that, before the civil right movement, African-Americans and their problems were not "seen" by the government or its white supporters. Ellison's character strings up 1,369 light bulbs in the apartment he is squatting because he needs to have one place where he can fight the psychological and emotional implications of feeling invisible in the public sphere, one place where he feels his existence acknowledged and take form. An interesting thing that Wall does in his photograph is to only have lit a small percentage of the light bulbs. In my imagination the character would have lit every light bulb and light would have taken on the symbolism it does in the Bible where it means hope. Is Wall showing us that a real person (not a literary character) would have gone crazy with so much light? Is Wall implying that the character was not willing to engage himself fully with the civil rights movement (not willing to be fully seen/recognized/formed because he was scared for his safety)? Or was Wall simply capturing a photo with the greatest amount of texture (shadows vs. light)? Regardless, Wall took a literary metaphor and recreated it through photography.