Jeff Wall

Photographs 1978–2004

Tate

2005   |  275 × 230mm   |  80pp

The customer is always right. And the wilfulness of artists can be something to be reckoned with. Every single one of the twenty-eight large backlit photographs in this exhibition was landscape in format yet Jeff Wall insisted that they appear in the catalogue across double-page spreads in a conventional portrait format book. The design challenge was to find a comfortable position for the spine fold across the middle of the photograph; the challenge for the printer and the binder was to marry the two halves of the image exactly in the bound book, not easy as they were, by necessity, sometimes printed different sides of the sheet or even on different sheets.