Allan Sekula
 Allan Sekula, Self-Portrait (Lendo, 12/22/02), 2002-03, cibachrome, 15 by 21 inches. | |
| Born |
January 15, 1951 Erie, Pennsylvania |
|---|---|
| Died |
August 10, 2013 (aged 62) Los Angeles, US |
Allan Sekula was a photographer, film maker, theoretician and art critique.
Life
Allan Sekula was born 1951 in the USA, lived, worked in Los Angeles and teached at the California Institute for the Arts. Not only since his participation at the documenta 11 and 12, has his work been highly discussed in the context of contemporary art dealing with socio-economic and cultural changes within globalized economy and policy. Through his photography, the artist, theoretician and scholar aspires to "reinvent the documentarism in ways that differ from the tradition of social documentary as well as from artistic photography and conceptual thinking" (Allan Sekula, Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh).
"As a writer, Allan described with great clarity and passion what photography can, and must do: document the facts of social relations while opening a more metaphoric space to allow viewers the idea that things could be different," said school of art dean Thomas Lawson in a statement. [1]
Sekula’s work is held in numerous collections including the Thyssen-Bornesmisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MACBA, Barcelona, the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the ARCO Foundation, Madrid.
Last year, the College Art Association granted him its Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art, in acknowledgement of his publication of books including Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-83 (1984) and Performance under Working Conditions (2003).
He died on August 2013, aged 62, following a long struggle with cancer.
Books
- Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983, 1984.
- with R. Bolton, The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography, 1989.
- Fish Story, 1995, 2002.
- Dead Letter Office, 1997.
- Dismal Science: Photoworks 1972-1996, 1999.
- Seemannsgarn, 2002.
- Titanic's Wake, 2003.
- Performance under Working Conditions, 2003.
- A Dialogue with Allan Sekula, 2005.
- Polonia and Other Fables, 2009.
- Ecrits sur la photographie: 1974-1986, Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2013 (french translation by Marie Muracciole) [2].
- Selected articles
- "Body and the Archive", October, no. 39, Winter 1986: 3 – 64.
- "The Traffic in Photographs", Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, Photography and the Scholar/Critic (Spring, 1981): 15-25.
- "Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)", October, Vol. 102, (Autumn, 2002): 3-34.
- "Reading An Archive:Photography between labour and capitalism", The Phtographer reader (ed. Liz Wells), Routledge, New York, 2003, Chap. 42: 443-452.
- "Debating Occupy" an article for Art in America, June/July 2012:103.
- Literature
- About Allan Sekula
- Zanny Begg, "Recasting Subjectivity. Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula", Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 6, November, 2005:625–636.
- Hilde Van Gelder, "A Matter of Cleaning up: Treating History in the Work of Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall", History of Photography, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2007: 68-80.
- Bill Roberts, "Production in View: Allan Sekula's Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism", immediations, 2, no. 4, December 2011:10-32 [3].
- Bill Roberts, "Production in View: Allan Sekula’s Fish Story and the Thawing of Postmodernism" (revised republication), Tate Papers, issue 18, Autumn 2012 [4].
Films
- A Short Film for Laos, 2006 [5]
- The Forgotten Space, 2010
Awards
- 2010, A. Sekula and Noël Burch won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival’s "Orizzonti" competition for documentary The Forgotten Space.
