Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula, Self-Portrait (Lendo, 12/22/02), 2002-03, cibachrome, 15 x 21".
Born	January 15, 1951(1951-01-15) Erie, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	August 10, 2013(2013-08-10) (aged 62) Los Angeles, United States

Allan Sekula (1951-2013) was a photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic. From 1985 until his death, he taught at California Institute of the Arts.

From the early 1970s, Sekula’s works with photographic sequences, written texts, slide shows and sound recordings have traveled a path close to cinema, sometimes referring to specific films. However, with the exception of a few video works from the early 70s and early 80s, he has stayed away from the moving image. This changed in 2001, with the first work that Sekula was willing to call a film, Tsukiji, a “city symphony” set in Tokyo’s giant fish market.

His books range from the theory and history of photography to studies of family life in the grip of the military industrial complex, and in Fish Story, to explorations of the world maritime economy. (Source)

Publications

Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983, Halifax, 1984, PDF.

Fish Story, 1995/2002, Log, PDF.

Books and catalogues

• Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983, Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984, 259 pp.
• Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter, 1995; 2nd ed., rev., 2002, 206 pp, PDF.
  • Seemannsgarn, trans. Wolfgang Himmelberg, Düsseldorf: Richter, 2002, 208 pp. (German)
• Dead Letter Office, Rotterdam: Nederlands Foto Instituut, 1997, 54 pp.
• Dismal Science: Photoworks 1972-1996, Illinois State University, 1999, 212 pp.
• Titanic's Wake, Cherbourg-Octeville: Point du jour, 2003, 119 pp. (English)/(French)
• Performance under Working Conditions, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003, 351 pp. (English)/(German)
• Polonia and Other Fables / Polonia i inne opowieści, ed. Karolina Lewandowska, Chicago: The Renaissance society at The University of Chicago, and Warsaw: Zache̜ta National Gallery of Art, 2009, 117 pp. (English)/(Polish)
• Ecrits sur la photographie: 1974-1986, trans. Marie Muracciole, Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2013. (French)
• Ship of Fools / The Dockers' Museum, Leuven University Press, 2015, 240 pp. [1]
• School is a Factory (1978-80), n.d.

Selected articles

• "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning", Artforum 13:5 (Jan 1975), pp 36-45; repr. in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981, pp 452-473.
• "Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation)", The Massachusetts Review 19:4 (Dec 1978), pp 859-883; repr. in Photography, Current Perspectives, ed. Jerome Liebling, Light Impressions, 1978, pp 231-255.
• "The Traffic in Photographs", Art Journal 41:1 (Spring 1981), pp 15-25.
• "Reading An Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capitalism", 1983; repr. in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells, New York: Routledge, 2003, pp 443-452.
• "The Body and the Archive", October 39 (Winter 1986), pp 3-64.
• "Michael Asher - Down to Earth", Afterall 1 (1999), London, pp 30-35; repr. in Michael Asher – Kunstraum, ed. Martin Fritz, Vienna: Kunstraum, 1996, pp 30-35.
• "Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)", October 102 (Autumn 2002), pp 3-34.
• "La política de la fotografía", trans. Elena Llorens Pujol, in Efecto real: debates posmodernos sobre fotografía, ed. Jorge Ribalta, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004, pp 35-64. (Spanish)
• "Debating Occupy", Art in America (June/July 2012), p 103.
• "Photography and the Limits of National Identity", Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014), pp. 28–33.
• "An Eternal Esthetics of Laborious Gestures", Grey Room 55 (Spring 2014), pp. 16–27.

Films

• A Short Film for Laos, 2006. [2]
• The Forgotten Space, 2010. [3]

Interviews

• Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen, "Interview with Allan Sekula. Los Angeles, California, October 26, 2002", International Labor and Working-Class History 66 (Oct 2004), pp 155-172. [4]
• Conversation between Allan Sekula and Stefan Römer, Allans Studio in Los Angeles, 7.10.2004. Footage for the film: Conceptual Paradise, 2006, 85 min.
• Allan Sekula by Edward Dimendberg, BOMB, Summer 2005.
• RMW SON(I)A: Interview with the Artist, Writer and Critic Allan Sekula, audio, Barcelona: MACBA, Jan 2011, 13 min.
• Allan Sekula: Ship of Fools. Interview by Grant Watson (M HKA), video, c2011, 21 min.

Literature

• Constantin Meunier, A Dialogue with Allan Sekula, ed. Hilde van Gelder, Leuven University Press, 2005, 135 pp. [5]
• Zanny Begg, "Recasting Subjectivity. Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula", Third Text 19:6 (Nov 2005), pp 625-636.
• Hilde Van Gelder, "A Matter of Cleaning up: Treating History in the Work of Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall", History of Photography 31:1 (Spring 2007), pp 68-80.
• Jan Baetens, Hilde van Gelder (eds.), Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula's Photography, Leuven University Press, 2010, 208 pp. [6]
• Caroline Sara Owen, Allan Sekula, Margarita Cabrera and Vik Muniz: Representations of the Social Conditions and Capital Relations of Labor, UC Riverside, 2011. Dissertation.
• Bill Roberts, "Production in View: Allan Sekula's Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism", immediations 2:4 (Dec 2011), pp 10-32; rev., Tate Papers 18 (Autumn 2012). [7]
• Gail Day, "Event. Allan Sekula 1951–2013" in Journal of Visual Culture 12(3): "The Archives Issue", eds. Juliette Kristensen and Marquard Smith, 2013, pp 515-518.
• Sally Stein, "Allan Sekula, 1951-2013", 2013.
• Grey Room 55: "Allan Sekula and the Traffic In Photographs", MIT Press, Spring 2014. [8]
• More

Links

• Sekula at Wikipedia
• Obituaries: CalArts, Phil Steinberg, Elisabeth Lebovici (in French).