What is an image? In what reference framework can photographic stagings be negotiated? And how is a definition of the image emerging in recent art history that cannot be grasped by the discourses of classical photography? These questions are discussed through the works of Canadian artist Jeff Wall. He established a new class of artistic photography, which has been part of the canon of contemporary art production as large-format lightboxes since the 1980s. Wall responds to the aesthetic demand for the dissolution of genre aesthetics at the end of the 1960s. He follows the logic of hybrid media connections, in which the tableau functions as a reference. However, alongside composition and paraphrase, it is the mode of image action, through which Wall contrasts the technique of production as time art with the technique of execution as image art.