Jeff Wall hits a new record: this is what a $3.6 million picture looks like, folks

Vancouver's Jeff Wall has just broken his own record, selling an artwork for $3.6 million on Tuesday at Christie's in New York.

That makes it the most expensive Canadian photograph ever sold, and the third most expensive photo sold in history.

The sprawling, macabre, and cinematic image, called Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), had been estimated to go for $1.5 million to $2 million.

Wall shot the image in 1992, using actors to portray a range of emotions of Soviet soldiers reacting to, and even chatting about their own deaths at the hands of the rebel mujahideen.

It's one of Wall's best-known works, and it's a chilling and disturbing piece: the wounds on the eerily reanimated soldiers are as explicit as anything in a horror movie. One despairing soldier has had his jaw ripped open by shrapnel; another has had his foot blown off.

Praise for the work has been wide-ranging. In one instance, Susan Sontag, in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, called Wall's depiction "exemplary in its thoughtfulness and power".

As a huge backlit transparency measuring 7.5 feet tall and 14 feet wide, it was exhibited at the Tate Modern gallery in London from October 2005 to January 2006.

The sale is significant on many levels, not least because of its gory and incendiary subject matter—a doomed war against Afghan resistance by the Soviets in the 1980s that has lasting repercussions today. It's also important because it takes photography, and the Vancouver School, to new heights in the world of art collection. And it certainly bodes well for our own Vancouver Art Gallery, the largest public collector of Wall's work.

It's about time for another Wall exhibit, don't you think?