ART CITIES:London-Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula revitalized documentary photography, provided critical foundations for theorizing the relationship between word and image, and was one of the earliest artists to cast a critical eye on globalization as social phenomenon. Photographer, film-maker, cultural theorist and political activist, Allan Sekula was one of the outstanding Marxist intellectuals of his generation. Almost at the end of his life, he co-directed an award-winning documentary film, and was renowned for the sheer range of his interests, his critical intelligence and enduring political commitment.

By Dimitris Lempesis

This exhibition “Photography, A Wonderfully Inadequate Medium” brings together a selection of Allan Sekula’s significant works, highlighting the formal and conceptual links between different periods of the artist’s practice, including photography, film and criticism. During his student days in the 1970s at the University of California, San Diego, he witnessed the economic and social changes that eventually ended up tightly restructuring the global economic situation. Inspired very early on by critical Marxist theory, his work was consistently engaged without becoming dogmatic; he remained constantly involved in recording the evolution of the world of labour in the face of globalized capitalism, through series of photographs relating strongly to facts but also to his critical writings. Introducing this exhibition are the photographic narratives of “California Stories” (1973-75), in which Sekula documents his surroundings and everyday life, and “This Ain’t China: A Photonovel” (1974), in which Sekula portrays the struggles of a group of workers with the conditions of the job. The latter is shown here together with its maquette and the video “Performance under Working Conditions” (1973)  about the same topic. Sekula built his photography practice from the prolongation of some of his early performances, and against the preference developed by conceptual photography for erasing any human presence; he took charge of the medium’s social roots, vernacular uses, and the dependency of the image on a range of facts and political issues. His first writings, along with photographic essays, were published by Benjamin Buchloh in 1984 under the title “Photography Against the Grain” and have stayed seminal to the critical history of the medium ever since. Sekula constantly experimented with diverse ways of intertwining the visual and the written, arguing that the photograph, especially the single photographic image, is radically insufficient as a mode of social and artistic communication. He was in fact interested by this insufficiency, the dependency of the photograph on its context and to all that provides it some meaning, the words and texts that interfere with visual perception. In his work, images are always fragments in a wider series, and often in diptychs or triptychs. He would produce a slideshow or a sequence and relate it to specific writings, which in return related to images, but also to art and literature with references that shed light on his photographs. One example is Sekula’s major photographic essay and book, “Fish Story” (1995), with its nine chapters comprising prints, slideshows, captions, and texts. “Fish Story follows two interwoven strands,” Sekula wrote in 1997, “both of which turn around questions of liminality and flux. First, it is a ‘documentary’ reading of contemporary maritime space. As both sea and land are progressively ‘rationalized’ by increasingly sophisticated industrial methods, does the ‘classic’ relation between terrestrial space and maritime space undergo a reversal? Does the sea become fixed and the land fluid? Second, Fish Story is an ‘art historical’ allegory of the sea as an object  of representation. How does the sea ‘disappear’ from the cognitive and  imaginative horizon of late modernity? Are there broader lessons to  be drawn from this disappearance?” In “Fish Story” like other series such as “Black Tide/Marea negra” (2002–03) or films such as “The Lottery of the Sea” (2006), Sekula developed his exploration of the maritime world, where he would travel for months, as a significantly “forgotten space”. Having grown up in a harbour, Sekula was aware of the sea world as a material, social, and economic space for the problems raised by capitalism and through this, by globalization.

Info: Curator: Marie Muracciole,  Marian Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John Street, London, Duration: 14/3-18/5/19. Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com