ALLAN SEKULA
American
Allan Sekula’s photographic practice is inseparable
from his work as a theorist and socioeconomic his-
torian of photography. With other influential fig-
ures, such as Victor Burgin and Martha Rosler, he
works within the Hegelian-Marxist tradition, draw-
ing on notions of the interpenetration of art and
society taken from philosophers and theorists Wal-
ter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Roland Barthes,
and others. In identifying photography as social
practice, Sekula has had significant impact, espe-
cially in North America and Europe.
Sekula was born in 1951 in Erie, Pennsylvania.
He attended the University of California, San
Diego, where as an undergraduate he took classes
simultaneously from the social philosopher Her-
bert Marcuse and the conceptual artist John Bal-
dessari. From the former, he learned one of the
central tenets of the Frankfurt School, which tire-
lessly sought to elucidate the complicity of the
educational system in general and of high science
in particular with what Eisenhower had identified
as ‘‘the military-industrial complex’’ on which the
economy of southern California, and Sekula’s own
family, largely depended. From Baldessari, he
learned to re-think art photography as prescribed
by modernism, and to see it rather as contingent on
the ideas of photographer and viewer. The dual
influence of Marcuse and Baldessari committed
Sekula to a dialectical approach in realizing his
socialist principles through his work, and provided
an escape from ‘‘the two chattering ghosts of bour-
geois science and bourgeois art which have haunted
photography from its inception.’’
Since the early 1970s, Sekula has reached a grow-
ing audience through work—characteristically a
sequence of prints or slides intercut by text—that
widely exhibited in solo and international group
exhibitions, adapted for publication inArtforum
andOctoberamong others, re-printed in important
anthologies debating the politics of representation,
and published in books such as Photography
Against the Grain (1984), Fish Story (1995), and
Dismal Science (1999).Some of his images quickly
acquired iconic status, especially those comprising
War Without Bodies(1991/96) which demonstrate
that the fascination with weapons invokes a physi-
cal response. This series, with its trenchant text,
was Sekula’s critique of the fascination with auto-
mated weapons of war that made, for the Amer-
icans, the 1991 Gulf War a ‘‘war without bodies.’’
Sekula’s work, in fact, is a sustained argument for
documentary photography, perhaps better termed
critical realism, which he advanced in the widely
circulated essayDismantling Modernism, Reinvent-
ing Documentary: Notes on the Politics of Represen-
tation(1976/78). It exposes both the myth that the
camera cannot lie and the more recent myth that
neither can it tell the truth. Although he asserts an
affinity between documentary practices and democ-
racy, he challenges the view that documentary
photography is inherently ‘‘universal’’ as it depicts
‘‘real humans’’ in situations or expressing emotions
that can be understood by all peoples. The seminal
1955 exhibitionThe Family of Manis a prime exam-
ple of an objectivity that Sekula argued is but a
delusion. He also argued against photography as
an autonomous art form following the traditional
fine arts model of providing a transcendent, genius-
derived, and essentially private experience as well as
against the more recent claim that photography has
re-attained the status of art through self-reflexive
staging.
Sekula instead claims a more modest, subservi-
ent status for photography, enabling a ‘‘radical
consciousness from below,’’ a lens, so to speak,
for close scrutiny of economic life in line with his
socialist ideology.Aerospace Folktales(1973) was
an early exercise in the deconstruction of a se-
quence of images by means of a text that directs,
if it does not initiate, the decoding of the images. In
this work, he explored themes that have persisted
to the present: the political economy of ‘‘ordinary’’
lives—in this case of his mother and father, an out-
of-work aerospace engineer—and his commitment
to history, in this case the history of his own for-
mation, that implies a critique of the alleged neu-
trality of images and the ubiquitous historical
amnesia he observed in American culture.
Sekula’s parents are also the protagonists in
Meditations on a Triptych (1973). Using family
snapshots, he brings to what Benjamin called ‘‘the
afterlife of the work’’ the kind of close reading ofSEKULA, ALLAN