With a career spanning more than three decades, it is almost impossible to
write about the work of Allan Sekula through the usual structures of key
projects or phases. Likewise, any attempt at an ‘overview’ of Sekula’s
output would fail to grapple with the full complexity of the political,
philosophical and visual dimensions of his projects and his investment in
them. As a writer/theorist and photographer/artist, Sekula’s seminal and
energetic contributions to the practice and thinking around photography and
its relation to the world, through essays such as ‘The Traffic in
Photographs’ (1981) and ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’ (1975),
has been both insistent and subtle.
Sekula’s artistic emergence came at a time when debates pitted photography’s
relation to ‘the real’ against humanist notions of social documentary. As
Sekula himself noted in the 1970s, ‘the old myth that photographs tell the
truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie’. Nevertheless, he has
consistently remained at the forefront of rethinking the ‘documentary’ form
and how culture enters into a discursive relationship with the wider world.
What remains striking about Sekula’s work is the relevance of themes which
have consistently appeared and re-appeared, and which remain pertinent if
not more urgent to us now. Combining a diversity of references from the
poetic to the analytic, Sekula picks away at issues such as the relation of
wage-labour to ideology, the economy of war, the globalisation of trade,
internet culture and the ecological costs of trade. Seeking to address such
problematics of our post-industrial age, Sekula employs sound, photographic
sequences, text and installation, as well as publications, in a manner that
balances the investigative with the imaginative, drawing on references as
diverse as Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, Bill Gates and Hollywood.
The sea has become a recurring motif which expresses a sense of liminality
and flux. ‘Fish Story’ (1995), for example, comprises photographic sequences
and texts that display Sekula’s ability to adopt a series of varying
photographic styles. After a brief documentary series of images reminiscent
of the work of Alfred Stieglitz, taken on the Staten Island ferry in New
York, the project ends in the port of Los Angeles. In stark contrast to
Hollywood’s depictions of the sea in films such as Waterworld (1995), A
Perfect Storm (2000) and Titanic (1997) (which so often utilise derelict
ports as film sets), Sekula traces the handling of cargo-containers, the
building of ships and the catching and selling of fish from the inside out.
In his own words, ‘Fish Story’ unmasks the ‘bourgeoisie’s fantasy of a world
of wealth without workers’ and depicts an industry hidden behind the myth of
an industry-free ‘information economy’. ‘Interpretation,’ he writes in
‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary’ (1978), ‘is ideologically
constrained. Our readings of past culture are subject to the covert demands
of the historical present. Mystified interpretation universalizes the act of
reading, lifting it above history.’
The series of photographs ‘Black Tide’ (2002) responds to the oil spill from
the tanker off the Galician coast in 2002 and uses the ocean once again as a
symbolic and real subject. Documentary images from the clean-up operation
are carefully arranged singularly and in pairs so that a man eating soup,
for example, is positioned above a swirling treacly soup of oil-covered sea.
In another an atmospheric portrait depicts a young volunteer with
oil-splashed overalls. The rear panel of a truck hangs like a
thickly-painted modernist canvas with the title, Dripping Black Trapezoid,
mocking the detachment of formalist painting. The text that accompanies
‘Black Tide’ reads like the script from a Homeric drama, depicting the real
events in the form of a musical play. Sekula understands that everyday
events inherently embody an element of fiction or theatre.
In response to ‘Fish Story’ Sekula writes, ‘it may seem at this point as
though I am performing a grotesque balancing act at a triple funeral: a
funeral service for painting, for socialism and the sea’. It is ultimately
Sekula’s persistence and unflinching analysis of the complex effects of
economy and politics, and moments of resistance against them, that continues
to provide us with a refreshingly resistant and contemporary voice. Sekula
makes you work hard, but the rewards are invigorating.
Clare Grafik is a Programme Organiser at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and Photography Editor for contemporary