Jeff Wall's $3.6 Million Photograph
Thoughts on how market dynamics shaped the sale of the most expensive Canadian photograph.
The highest amount achieved at auction by a Canadian photographer was US$3,666,500.
On May 8, 2012, Jeff Wall’s massive lightbox-mounted Cibachrome photograph, Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) set a record at Christie’s New York. It was the third most expensive photograph ever auctioned at the time and now stands at tenth, alongside works by the likes Andreas Gursky, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Prince. No other works by Wall are in the top thirty, though Gursky, Sherman and Prince all appear more than once. No other Canadian finds themselves on the list.
Dead Troops Talk is monumental in scale at 229.2cm × 417.2cm, or nearly 14 feet long. Originally executed in 1992, the 2012 print sold at Christie’s is the first of an edition of two, plus an artist proof. The other print is housed in The Broad collection in Los Angeles.
So, what were the conditions that enabled Dead Troops Talk to command such a high price blowing through its initial estimate of US$1,500,000 – 2,000,000?
By 2012 Wall had achieved international recognition. His work had representation and consistent solo-showings at prestigious commercial galleries like White Cube and Marian Goodman Gallery. He also had a significant exhibition run at public institutions, like his 2007 show that travelled from The Museum of Modern Art to the Art Institute of Chicago and ended at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 2008, among other shows at major art institutions globally.
It wasn’t just in the commercial and institutional arenas that Wall had built his reputation. His photographs were finding themselves centered in a great deal of intellectual and academic conversation. Canadian critics, such as Michael Fried in his 2008 Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, wrote extensively about Wall and the 'Vancouver School' of photo-conceptualist photographers, which included artists like Stan Douglas, Ian Wallace, and Vikky Alexander. But perhaps the most notable was that in her 2003 publication Regarding the Pain of Others, the famed writer on and critic of photography Susan Sontag, devoted several pages to Dead Troops Talk. Sontag’s opening description of the work as “exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power” is frequently quoted in discussions about the piece, though notably absent from Christie’s ‘Lot Essay’ for the auction.
There are also the less considered conditions of the sale that may have been the ones that truly impacted the final price. These are the conditions that I tend to look for in my work as an appraiser, and that I find bring a much more tangible component to filling out the context around the sale price achieved at that May 8, 2012 auction.
Wall’s works were experiencing a steady rise in auction prices. His 1989 image The Well sold for US$1,243,581 at a 2008 Sotheby's London sale, and his 2001 image The Forest sold for just US$993,000 at a Sotheby's New York auction that same year. However, the number of Wall photographs of this size coming to auction were relatively few. Between 2000 and 2012 there were many smaller works under 80x80cm that came to auction, about 50 of them, all selling around the US$100,000 and all around +/- 20% of the estimated value set before the sale. There was a handful of larger works, around 200x200cm, including The Forrest and The Well, that sold for upwards of US$600,000 and surpassing the million-dollar mark. But at over 200x400cm Dead Troops Talk stood out as a true rarity in Wall’s body of work. The monumental scale, the rarity of that scale in the corpus of the artist, and the, to use Sontag’s words, exemplary thoughtfulness of the work’s subject are key factors in the sale. These factors are compounded by the fact that Wall has said that Dead Troops Talk took him nearly six years to complete as he meticulously created and arranged the details of both subject and composition.
It is possible that the exceptional provenance of the work contributed to its value. It’s a fascinating thing when a collector dies. Those works squirrelled away from public view are brought out into the world for all of us to gaze upon. Dead Troops Talk went right from Wall to the Marian Goodman Gallery to the collection of the late David and Geraldine Pincus, two extremely well-regarded collectors of contemporary art and photography. Wall’s work, with its intricate staging and references to art history, would have appealed to these collectors who were not only interested in photography but were also invested in conceptual and contemporary art. The exposure and selling of their collection created a bit of a buying frenzy, most notably Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow, which sold at the very same May 8 auction and broke the record for a piece of post-war contemporary art at US$86,882,500, doubling its pre-sale estimate. Nothing to guarantee your blue-chip investment piece like it having been owned by another blue-chip investor.
Despite Wall’s significance as an artist, the record-breaking price achieved by Dead Troops Talk cannot be attributed solely to the work’s artistic or cultural value. The sale was the result of a confluence of market forces, from the rarity of monumental works by Wall to the exceptional provenance of the piece.
This sale underscores the importance of understanding the broader ecosystem of the art market. Auction prices are rarely a pure reflection of a work’s inherent artistic value; instead, they are shaped by factors such as collector confidence, institutional recognition, scarcity, and timing. In the case of Dead Troops Talk, these elements aligned in ways that may not repeat for other Canadian artworks—or even for Wall himself.
While Canadian art may not frequently dominate the international market, the sale remains a watershed moment. It demonstrates that Canadian art can hold its own on the global stage and, in a perfect storm of factors, challenge the dominance of more established art markets.