In the introduction to his essay Liquid Intelligence, Jeff Wall puts forward a theory of photographic ontology as a confrontation between the "dry" and the "liquid". The liquid represents the unpredictable and infinitely varied forms occuring in nature, and for Wall "connects photography to the past, to time, in an important way." The dry on the other hand is the mechanical, scientific, and objective, which can be seen as a strong influence on the photojournalistic straight photographic style. To Wall, though photography is scientfically a triumph of the dry, and becomes even more so with the advent of digital photography, the liquid intelligence still plays a large part to make photography aesthetically interesting.
Jeff Wall recounts how in his early career he was faced with the contradiction between a sincere respect for the masters of straight photography and the neo avant-garde spirit of the age that considered them obsolete. Not fully satisfied with either pure photojournalistic photography or pure avant-garde abandonment of aesthetic criteria, Wall decided to search for what was interesting in photography by comparing and contrasting distinctly different, but related artforms. From examining painting, he derived the importance of scale, pictorialism and immediacy. From film he derived an appreciation for the proliferation of techniques that were frequently employed, in addition to the straight documentary style which was the film equivalent of photojournalism. However, he concludes that the intellectually stimulating aspect of photography lies not in one particular form or technique, but relating back to the concept of liquid memory, in the push and pull in the conceptual space between dry and liquid.
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