Jeff Wall:

Before the Image

Informant (2023)

Juan Marsé’s novel Últimas tardes con Teresa (Last afternoons with Teresa), published in 1966, is the story of an affair between Manolo, a young man from one of Barcelona’s post–World War II migrant neighborhoods, and Teresa, a girl from a wealthy family. The book creates a panoramic critical vision of the rapidly changing social order of the 1950s. The ambitious and attractive antihero, poorly educated and without prospects, is pursuing illegal means of livelihood—stealing motorbikes—in the rough conditions of the El Camel neighborhood, still emerging from the hillsides above the city. This involves him in business with an older man, uncle to a fifteen-year-old girl who otherwise has no family. She is Hortensia, and has been infatuated with Manolo for some years. She, like her rival Teresa, is blonde. Hortensia has found work in a local pharmacy, one of the newly established businesses in an area with rudimentary services and few paved streets. Priding herself on her properly legal occupation, in contrast to the kinds of things she sees around her, she insists on wearing her white lab coat everywhere and has become well-known locally. The author devotes few passages to Hortensia, but her relationship with Manolo and her intense frustration and jealousy pulse throughout the long narrative.

Things come to a climax near the end of the novel. One night, provoked once too often by Manolo’s flirtatious yet dismissive treatment, Hortensia witnesses him stealing another motorbike in order to visit Teresa in her parents’ distant villa, and, seemingly on impulse, decides to inform the police. The pharmacy has a private telephone, in an era when access to the device was very restricted; this gives Hortensia a unique opportunity to inform anonymously. Marsé never describes or comments on her feelings, thoughts, or actions in enabling the authorities to arrest and convict Manolo and bring the novel to its conclusion.

The photograph was taken in Barcelona in 2023. The smaller image inserted into the larger one reveals that she is on the telephone to the police.

Portrait in Noto (2007)

I traveled in Sicily in the autumn of 2007 with the intention of photographing a rocky hillside. There’s something timeless about them, captured in this passage from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) describing a hunt by the protagonist and his companion:

The term “countryside” implies soil transformed by labour; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily, that America of antiquity. Don Fabrizio and Tumeo climbed up and down, slipped and were scratched by thorns, just as any Archidamus or Philostratus must have been tired and scratched twenty-five centuries before. . . . When the hunters reached the top of the hill, there among the tamarisks and scattered cork trees appeared the real Sicily again, the one compared to which baroque towns and orange groves are mere trifles.

A few days after completing the photograph Hillside, Sicily, we entered the baroque town of Noto, intending a brief visit before continuing my search for another possible hillside image. (I soon found one on the outskirts of Ragusa.) At a café, we noticed a middle-aged woman accompanied by a young man who might have been her son. She was behaving unusually and he was attempting to manage and possibly protect her. My wife, Jeannette, felt an intense sympathy for the woman and the boy and suggested we try to photograph them. But we hesitated and they disappeared. We left Noto after admiring its remarkable architecture and headed west into the hills, but we continued to think about those two and decided to go back to Noto to see if we could find them, thinking that they were likely known in the neighborhood. Our guide was confident he could locate them, and did so within a few hours. She came to our meeting place, without the young man, who was in fact her son, but with an adult man who negotiated with us. I photographed her in about fifteen minutes. I explicitly do not do portraits, but made an exception in this one circumstance.