The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto has opened a retrospective of Jeff Wall, the Vancouver photographer whose meticulously constructed images have shaped how we think about the medium for nearly half a century. The Globe and Mail's critic, reviewing the show, argues that Wall's work demands exactly this kind of sustained, repeated looking — and rewards it.

That demand is built into the pictures themselves. Wall does not hunt for decisive moments. He builds them. His large-scale, backlit transparencies in lightboxes — a format he adapted from advertising displays — present scenes that appear candid but are staged with the deliberation of cinema. A passerby glances sideways in a vacant lot; figures occupy urban spaces with the staged unease of history painting. The viewer registers an ordinary moment, then slowly discovers the artifice underneath, and the image changes in the process.

This is the crux of Wall's importance to the history of photography. Where street photographers pursued the unrepeatable instant, Wall approached the camera the way a director or a painter approaches a canvas: casting, blocking, lighting and revising until the photograph expresses precisely what he wants it to. The results sit uncomfortably — productively so — between documentary and fiction. His images borrow compositions and social themes from painters such as Manet and Hokusai, translating the traditions of pictorial art into a photographic idiom that feels at once theatrical and deadpan.

A retrospective setting suits this practice unusually well. Wall's photographs are dense, large and slow, and museum walls give them the room and the time they require. Seeing a critical mass of them together allows the viewer to trace the through-lines: the Pacific Northwest urban and suburban environments, the labouring and marginalized figures, the misty forests and interiors that seem to hold their breath. It also exposes the consistency of his craft — the way light, whether natural or fabricated, does the emotional work in every frame.

The Globe and Mail's review suggests the exhibition makes a case for revisiting an artist who has been so influential that his innovations risk being taken for granted. A generation of photographers adopted the large print, the staged scene and the cinematic scale; Wall originated the vocabulary. Encountering the originals again, at MOCA, restores the strangeness that imitation has dulled.

For Toronto, the show also carries institutional weight. Wall is among the most internationally celebrated Canadian artists of any medium, and a full retrospective on Canadian soil is a significant event for MOCA, which has been building its exhibition program since relocating to its current address in the city's west end. The museum has staked its identity on ambitious, museum-scale presentations of contemporary art, and securing Wall positions it firmly in that league.

The exhibition invites audiences to slow down — to look once, look again, and notice that the second look reveals an entirely different picture. In an image-saturated culture, that is a deliberately countercurrent proposition, and it is Wall's most durable contribution to the medium.

Whether the retrospective travels beyond Toronto, or shapes the critical reassessment of Wall's late career that many observers anticipate, will depend on how audiences and institutions respond to this gathering of work. For now, the pictures are on the wall in Toronto, glowing in their lightboxes, waiting patiently to be mistaken for ordinary life one more time.