The Flooded Grave

This is a photograph, but it is far larger than most. It stands about seven and a half feet tall and about nine feet wide, so it fills your view the way a big painting does. It is a transparency in a light box, which means the image is printed on clear film and lit from behind, so it seems to glow. The subject is a grave in a cemetery, and the grave is full of water, with a living underwater world inside it. At first it looks like one plain, truthful picture of a strange moment. It is not.

Jeff Wall spent two years on this work. He began by taking pictures in two cemeteries in Vancouver over several months. Then, in his studio, he built a tank for water, shaping it from a plaster cast of a real grave. Working with marine-life specialists, he grew a living underwater world inside it, matching one found off the coast of Vancouver. Using computer technology, he combined countless photographs, some of real places and some of scenes he constructed, into a single image. The result is the convincing illusion of a grave filled with water.

Wall's pictures often have the sharp clarity of news or documentary photography, yet many of them are staged. He also aims for the scale and ambition of grand history paintings, the huge canvases made to tell important stories. We usually think of a photograph as a record of one moment in time. This one challenges that idea, because it was assembled over years from many pieces. It is an elaborate fantasy about the hidden, subconscious life of the picture itself. Look a little longer at the water in the grave, and ask yourself how much of what you see ever existed together.