Wall indeed follows the dictum introduced by Charles Baudelaire in “The Painter of Modern Life,”2 to represent life as it is experienced in reality, yet he does so differently from the “decisive moment” photographers of the mid-twentieth century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and others). His “street photographs” are not really street photographs, nor are they documentary: they only reactivate, via cinematographic techniques, the iconography and aesthetics of street photography. They contain a concentration and suspension of a real event, neither iconic nor symbolic, which was extracted, as it were, from Wall’s archive of mundane memories and reconstructed to convey authenticity.
Nineteenth-century French painting is an important reference point in Wall’s early works, and Mimic calls to mind the composition of Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877) [fig. 1] by Gustave Caillebotte, one of the distinctive painters of modern urban life. The wrapping coats, the sheltering umbrellas, and the Haussmannesque urbanism of the Paris boulevards in Caillebotte’s painting close in on the key figures, confining the openness of the urban outdoors into an atmosphere of an interior—a gaze which Thomas Crow attributes to the visual experience of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur.3) The figure on the extreme right is cut, reinforcing the immediacy of the gaze and the randomness of the moment.
Mimic depicts a mundane moment attesting to a crisis. It features a couple, a man and a woman, whose apparel is indicative of lower middle class: the bearded man wears an orange t-shirt, a jeans jacket, and worn shoes; the woman is in red shorts and a midriff shirt. They walk towards us, hand in hand, on the right side of the photograph, but the man paternally drags the woman who lags behind him. The woman’s reserved gaze is turned sideways, perhaps to spare herself the sight of her partner imitating the Asian man to his right. Perhaps she is even trying to slow their pace to prevent a possible confrontation between the two men. The attire of the Asian-looking man who walks on the margin of the sidewalk is neat and dignified. The bearded man makes a slighting gesture at him, imitating slanted eyes. Moreover, he uses his middle finger, a gesture which—in addition to its racist chauvinism—contains sexist defiance, possibly indicating fear of “racial defilement” through the sexual act. As opposed to other works by Wall (e.g. The Storyteller or A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947), here there is no verbal communication between the figures (even between the couple there is explicit alienation, which is only enhanced by their physical proximity and hand holding). The occurrence here is deciphered not via words, but through the figures, their humanity, their relationships, or, as Georges Perec put it, “We shall never be able to explain or justify the town. The town is there. It’s our space, and we have no other. We were born in towns. We grew up in towns….There’s nothing inhuman in a town, unless it’s our own humanity.”4
Wall invests great time and effort in pinpointing the exact spot in which to locate the camera, and constructs the perspective so as to make observation of the work active. In this way he frees himself from the place. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for, until I find it,” he says. “Mimic needed the plunging perspective and I like the hill rising up in the back.”5 The high, blurred horizon at the peak of the sloping street and the vantage point, which is not central, seem to push the figures to the foreground. All these—along with the parked cars, the road sign prohibiting something,6 and the residential and light-industry buildings around—reinforce the sense of spontaneity and immediacy of street photography. Like Wall’s other works, however, Mimic, too, is “about looking closely, about the pleasure of seeing the world in all its sensual intricacy. By looking closely, gazing on the two-dimensional surface of the photograph, one enjoys the sensual pleasure, letting the phenomenon filter through it.7 As viewers, we are forced to “enter” the picture, our gaze shifting from the Asian man to the bearded man, and from there to the woman, and then left, up the steep street.
Wall is interested in photography’s added value, in the referent-free dimension of the medium, in the things which are not visible in the photograph, yet still operate within it. He constructs his works a-priori so as to prevent total identification between the representation and the represented. By working with “actors” in “staged” situations he infuses the figures with a duality, destroying the schematic nature of the picture; the significance rejects what is initially seen. The gesture of racist imitation, as indicated by the title, is the anchor that captures our gaze. “The gesture was so small,” Wall recalls, “I was interested in the mimesis, the physical mimesis. The white man was copying the Asian’s body. Mimes