Abstract
Allan Sekula at the Vacation Village Trade Show: A Raw Material Piece, exhibition at the University of California at San Diego, winter 1973, a collaboration between two faculty and students (Steve Buck, Louise Kirtland, Fred Lonidier, Allan Sekula, Phil Steinmetz, Barbara Greenlee and Ruth Krimmel). Photograph courtesy of Fred Lonidier.
It is impossible to imagine key directions taken in recent art and photographic practices without the formative impact of Allan Sekula. It is not so much that he has produced a raft of imitators – his has been a singular intervention – but rather that growing numbers came to understand his distinctive way of combining aesthetics and politics. Yet, despite the opening up of modern art institutions to photography (and also to documentary), his work defied established genres and the expected modalities of art, and refused the simple stand-offs between modernism and realism so often preferred by cultural theory.
While his criticism of claims to documentary transparency chimed with the rise of political modernism in the 1970s, Sekula remained committed to developing a realist project, setting him apart from the dominant trends in critical art practice in the next decades. He criticised the preoccupation with the play of signs, quotations, appropriations and staging – approaches whose model of reflexivity he found too internalised and anti-materialist. Instead, Sekula aspired to develop an externally directed conception of reflexive practice; to interrogate the connections – however troubled or problematic – between representation and reality. He sought a realism not ‘of appearances or social facts’, but instead a critical realism ‘of everyday experience in and against the grip of advanced capitalism’, a ‘hybrid paraliterary revision of social documentary’. Accordingly, Sekula’s high degree of consciousness of the power relations generated by the camera did not lead him to conclude that the photographer should withdraw from the public domain; rather it presented the obligation to rethink the institutionalization of the medium’s techniques and protocols. His critique of photojournalism – his insistence on the photographer’s positioning as partisan – was fulfilled strikingly with Waiting For Tear Gas, which recorded the 1999 Seattle protests against the WTO. In his earlier Untitled Slide Sequence of the end-of-shift exit of workers and managers leaving an aerospace plant, Sekula overturns the position of photographer-flaneur, the relations established between viewpoint and subjects akin to those that might be provoked by a militant paper-seller trespassing on private corporate space.
Sekula interpreted the open artwork in its strongest, social and politicized sense, drawing on Bakhtin and Vološinov. As he outlined in Photography Against the Grain in 1984, the photographic act is inescapably enmeshed in a dialogical and performative politics. Less authoring artist (or ‘neutral’ photojournalist), the photographer was conceived as one social actor beckoned by the world and working within the web of interpellations formed by other social agents and situations. All aspects of the photographic encounter were conceived as enunciatory moments staked within a field of social and political contestations – that is, as a social practice.
There is much in Sekula’s approach that has attracted those younger artists who find it pressing to struggle against capitalism: his dedication to the critique of capitalism and radical internationalism; his strong emphasis on the role of social relations for his work, anticipating relational practice; his standing with the protestors, as a protestor (Waiting for Tear Gas), or with campaigners for the rights of workers (Ship of Fools), or with the Galician fishing communities and environmental volunteers attempting to clear an oil spill (Marea Negra); his sustained project to explore the labour-capital relation (from Aerospace Folktales and Performance Under Working Conditions to the present); the historical global interconnections of maritime labour and the transformations wrought to it by containerization and the system of ‘flag of convenience’ (Fish Story, Titanic’s Wake, Lottery of the Sea, The Dockers’ Museum, and, with Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space); his non-precious aesthetic; his detailed research and precise pictorial intelligence (as exemplified by his essay for Fish Story or his outstanding analysis of the Leslie Shedden archive in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948–1968).
Sekula has been criticized by some for sacrificing the aesthetic to the political. This could not be more wrong-placed. On the contrary, he operated on the very testing ground of the aesthetic-political. Sekula’s was an approach that understood the power of heteronomy (both in itself and for a critical model of autonomy), and that understood how the aesthetic will be deadened the moment one stops wagering on efforts to change the world. Above all, it is important to grasp the praxial dimensions of his dialectic. This is a question of his partisanship and commitment, of course, but it also concerns the temporality embraced by his imagination, found in his sense of time and timing, and how this imagination is gauged to social struggle as transformational and potentially transitive practice. Sekula emphasized the poetic and lyrical aspects of his realism, insisting on prose’s distinctive poetic: Constantin Meunier’s sculptures of labourers, Walker Evans’s ‘documentary style’, Flaherty’s or Grierson’s documentaries, the work of Joris Ivens, the poetic realism of French film in the 1930s, and Italian neo-realism. Sekula knew such works intimately, appreciated and yet was also critical of their limitations. Prose’s poetic had to be found without mutating documentary into a site of creative genius (the liberal-humanist treatment of Lewis Hine); without the privileged, romanticised or condescending middle-class perspectives on peasant or working-class lives; without the Proletkult or Zhdanovist positivity of labour and instrumentalization of culture; and without the political fatalism that shadowed ‘poetic realist’ film. What form might a properly critical-realist poetic take? It would not be achieved by overlaying naturalism with symbolism, and not by providing some arty flourishes or requisite ‘art read-out’ codes to satisfy the guardians of the institutional aesthetic.
Sekula’s sense of the poetic, much influenced by his engagement with David Antin, also, I think, comes close to Georg Lukács’s speculations on the ‘poetry of life’. To our ears, Lukács’s formulation sounds limply humanist (and is not without Popular Frontist residues), but it was coined primarily to signal what counters the ‘stilling of life’, what resists capital’s reification of social forms. Central to Sekula’s project was the recovery of concealed social process between capital and labour, with his feet firmly planted in the latter’s camp. The issue was how to salvage the social dialogic from a medium (photography) that suppresses its own ‘dialogical social origins’. Another was how to reconstruct the metonymic links between labour and its products, between human activity and the world it creates, the connections elided by capital’s social relations and production methods. These Sekula navigated variously through his explorations of montage, picture sequencing and panorama, through the combination of images with words, through essays, wall texts, sound, and through video- and film-essays. He recently underscored his aim: not an exploration of labour as a ‘positivity’ (a mode he associated with both socialist realism and Steichen’s The Family of Man), but in its fundamental negativity, its shaping by unemployment and the extraction of surplus-value. His poetic too proceeded by negation. The difficulty Sekula confronted unflinchingly – and which remains before us – is that the ‘stilling’ occurs twice over: as a problem for photography and film (as for all representation), and also as the metabolism of capital’s social economy. This calls for a double poetic: to recover the social dialogic for counter-representations and counter-relationalities, and also for the militant life ‘in and against the grip of advanced capitalism’.