Jeff Wall was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1946. He received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis on Berlin Dada. He studied with T.J. Clark at London's Courtauld Institute from 1970-1973, and worked as a writer until 1977, when he made his first lightboxes. In 2006, Wall received the prestigious Hasselblad Award, putting him in the company of such photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams. A major traveling retrospective stopped at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and 2008.