NEW YORK --The name is as it should be. Jeff Wall's photographs are just that, wall photographs: the pursuit of murals by other means.

Most of the 40 pictures that make up his namesake exhibition, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art through May 14, are very big: some as large as 8 feet by 10 feet.

Photographic bigness, at least around Boston, seems on the March. Last year, there was Laura McPhee's "River of No Return " at the Museum of Fine Arts. Edward Burtynsky's "China Series" is currently showing at the Tufts University Art Gallery. And Martin Schoeller's "Close Up" is at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester.

Wall's pictures are bigger than any of those. They have the scale of history paintings in the grand tradition, imposing visual edifices meant to overwhelm viewers even more, perhaps, than provoke or delight them. Instead of battles and coronations, he trades in subjects of a more routine sort: beans on a table, patrons waiting to enter a nightclub, a man whose milk is captured in mid-spill.

Wall isn't just pursuing murals by other means, but the very course of art history. With these mighty pictures, he asserts photography's claim as rightful heir to the primacy painting has held among the visual arts since the Renaissance. His style isn't painterly. He's about as Pictorialist as Weegee. But the references to, and rivalry with, painting are unmistakable.

"Staining bench, furniture manufacturer's, Vancouver," could be an Anselm Kiefer in a world without impasto. The gorgeous austerity of the rows of white wall slats in "Sunken Area" puts almost any Minimalist canvas to shame. "Rainfilled Suitcase" and "The Flooded Grave" -- a picture as striking as its title -- are Dada creations, pure and not so simple. (Wall, who was born in 1946, wrote his master's thesis in art history on Dada in Berlin.)

Wall doesn't ignore the documentary impulse that has driven most photographers since the medium began. He clearly cherishes the unemphatic lushness of his native Vancouver, as in "Coastal Motifs" or "The Old Prison." Note the incongruity of the latter title, though. Even when recording, he's subverting. The documentary impulse is at best subsidiary -- as it has become for most painting since the invention of photography. Wall sees both media as playing by the same rules. Any presentation of a common, external reality in Wall's pictures is incidental to the presentation of his own artistic vision.

One obvious form Wall's diffidence toward the documentary takes is the frequent staging of what he shoots. His is no snapshot aesthetic. The only decisive instant for him is when everyone acknowledges being in position and ready to pose. That eruption of milk was arranged for the camera's convenience. Meteorology determines, but did not initiate, the kite-like lofting of paper in the marvelous "A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)." It's another artist, David Lynch, who's called to mind by the warm-and-fuzzy creepiness of "A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947."

Wall has been deeply influenced by film. His work can be seen as massive film stills no less than as here-and-now history paintings. Most of the pictures are transparencies shown in lightboxes. Looking at them, it's as if we're watching plasma-screen TVs on freeze frame. The earliest pictures in the show date from 1979, so it's not as if Wall intended the effect. Reacting to art's present, he managed to anticipate technology's future.

Wall has spoken of his profound regard for cinematic Neorealism, a regard borne out in the mundane subject matter of so many of his pictures. Neorealism is a black-and-white genre, of course, and Wall's affinity for its content clashes with his general reliance on color. There's a rich tension between the near-irresistible appeal of Wall's chromatic palette and the sheer dailiness of a picture like "A view from an apartment." The use of that indefinite article is telling. There's a ravishing particularity in Wall's colors that's often at war with the generic nature of his content. It's a war he may or may not win, but he enjoys waging it.

There are four black-and-white photographs in the show, and they bear out how important color is for Wall. The pictures look drained and dead, blanched in deed as well as fact. They also look unnervingly like Photorealist canvases, perhaps the slyest Wall rejection of photography's junior-partner status.

Not all of Wall's pictures are big. "After 'Spring Snow' by Yukio Mishima, chapter 34" is a "mere" two feet by two feet. But bigness predominates, with two main viewing consequences.

One is the ease of picking out details and fastening on them: The box of Crayolas in a photograph of a man making an anatomy drawing, the handsomely veined bar of soap in "Diagonal Composition" (a nicely Constructivist title, no?), the look on the face of the afflicted party in "Insomnia."

For all that man's visible anguish, one has little real feeling for him. This is the other consequence of the scale of these pictures: a consistent, and consistently unnerving, sense of distance. They're so big that, as the old saw has it, you feel as though you could walk right into them. But the emotional distance you'd feel walking down a Vancouver street -- not meeting the eye of passersby, keeping to yourself -- is the same distance experienced in front of these photographs. It's so natural to stare at the people in a work of art -- they so completely accept our gaze -- and that is no small part of art's pleasure. Jeff Wall's pictures don't work that way. They make us avert our gaze even as we look at them. His pictures' bigness makes us feel small.