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The essential preoccupation of this paper is documentary practice as (social) praxis, the voice of the photography's a direct mode of transmission and not only the discovery or mediation of reality. Allan Sekula's photographic discourse is taken as a case study, a practice that directly engages the subject - the position of the worker within the working class, critically representing the reality that is usually masked by spectacle. The hypotheses assume that the methodology of contextualization and discursivization of documentary photography (Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972) leads to a conscious perception of a historical and social reality. Using a cross-methodology of the author's theory and practice, referring to the author's critical point of view, Marxist and post-Marxist theories, this paper indicates that Sekula develops a specific photo-graphology concerned with the directness of expression, the literalness of meaning, and the unmasking of iconic signs captured by capitalist signifiers. The arguments underline that the use of documentary photography as a direct appeal can encourage the realization of a social act. The conclusion implies that the use of the author's voice in the direction of changing the movement of aesthetic production and reception leads to actualization, towards awakening of the passive component - confrontation with social stratification under capitalist order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special-issue introduction historicizes and seeks to move beyond the antinomy between totality and culture that is today a mainstay of much contemporary critical theory. The introduction proceeds in three parts. The first examines a midcentury crisis of Marxism that, concomitant with major shifts in global capitalism, set the scene for subsequent scholarly accounts of culture that have privileged the fragment, the supplement, the remainder, the site, the margins, and the like over against the totality. The second part consists of an analysis of two works of art—by the American visual artists Allan Sekula and Ellen Gallagher, respectively—which we take to be exemplary of the affordances of art, literature, and other forms of cultural expression for accessing totality anew. The third part briefly surveys recent theoretical work that aims to put a revitalized concept of totality at the center of cultural critique. The introduction concludes with summaries of the seven articles included herein. The special issue covers a lot of ground in terms of subject matter, theoretical milieu, disciplinary framework, and style. What binds the articles together is, in effect, a shared working method, which involves thinking through the relationship between a specific cultural object (or set of objects) and the social whole in and through which it emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a reading of the American photographer Allan Sekula's 1995 essay "Dismal Science" alongside The Forgotten Space, an essay film he directed with Noël Burch in 2010. These works are still resonant today because they suggest the possibility of picturing the totality of capitalist modernity. Sekula's representations of the shipping container and the subsequent shifts in maritime economy recuperate the prospect of a panoramic, totalizing view in an era marked by a prevalence of detail and data over meaningful grand narrative. The totality the container embodies and represents, however, is not the whole of a frictionless and seamless accumulation of capital but a nonsynchronous, polemical, and critical totality of struggle and antagonism. Sekula turns the shipping container from a stand-in for a system of commodity circulation to an allegorical sign of the continuing fight between labor and capital. Rather than envisioning this totality of struggle as a merely thematic concern, Sekula's compositions eschew commodification on the level of form by delving into the constitutive tensions of realism and reintroducing a living context of militancy and resistance into the matter of representation itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes inspiration from Allan Sekula's remarks on New Topographics photography, as well as his own 'geography lessons', to interrogate how photographs of 'man-altered landscapes' give visual form to the problems of temporality, natural history and historical agency that mark life in the Capitalocene. It proposes that combining Fredric Jameson's analysis of the way that capital congeals 'quantities of the past' into dead labour with Andreas Malm's diagnosis of our 'warming condition' allows us both to diagnose and counter the temptation to a sublime inhumanity that so often haunts contemporary panoramas of ecological devastation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gone in 2013, Allan Sekula is a theorist and a photographer, with a strong and political work. Under the influence of Walter Benjamin, he wanted to write an history of photography in a materialist perspective. He defends the idea that the sense of a picture depends on the discursive and social context, not in the picture itself. Such a history emphasizes relations of production and conflicts of interest in labor’s representations. Sekula’s essay, Photography, Between Labor and Capital (1983), returns to the evolutions of photography and industrial capitalism, with a focus on the pictures of coal mine. With a keen awareness of strength and weakness of his medium, Sekula used a fragmentary aesthetic: workers’ bodies are divided by the modern management; the globalisation scattered in strategic and unequal spaces around the world. And by the addition of text in order to reveal a possible ideological domination, or the exchanges between the artist and his subject, his own work shows at last a fragmented reality. Often invisible, these relations are essential in the process of making pictures.

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“Pietro Debenedetti Lecture 2018”, organized by CIM. Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sulla Morfologia “Francesco Moiso” (Turin, March 16, 2018).

Between 1973 and 1976 a few students like Fred Lonidier, Phel Steinmetz, Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula got together at the University of California in San Diego and shared photography practice and artistic thoughts and developed a critical practice linked to the artistic, political, social and economical topics of their time. The UCSD welcomed European thinkers who brought a critical mind and left-wing thoughts among most students as well as among the four photographers who were personally standing up for many causes. They were interested in the early 1970s' American society and especially in its capitalist facets. Using various points of view, the young photographers showed and criticized the social, political and artistic consequences of those capitalist ideas, which were also affecting other fields than politics. These four photographers have triggered a real reflexion and offered a personal, new and engaged perspective on a capitalist society and its effects. Indeed, with its productions (texts, photographs, and performances) the San Diego School is a perfect illustration of that counter culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The display of Allan Sekula's Waiting for Tear Gas (white Globe to Black) at Tate Modern from July 2013 to May 2014 coincided partly with Liberate Tate's creative civil disobedience against Tate's engagement with their sponsor British Petroleum. The article examines these two parallel episodes of Tate's recent institutional history, focusing on the tension emerging from the Tate's display of an artwork, which stems directly from a grassroots activist movement, and the institutional reluctance to engage with an artist-activist collective that targets the museum itself, or its sponsors. The article argues that Sekula's artwork and Liberate Tate's collaborative artistic interventions and participatory performances are part of a horizontal and rhizomatic network of anti-capitalist struggles against the privatisation of every aspect of life, the destruction of the environment and the degradation of human relations and attest to their unfinished nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a possible conceptual framework for the understanding of Allan Sekula's last and unfinished project Ship of Fools / The Dockers' Museum (2010-2013). It explores how the vast collection of vintage objects Sekula assembled for The Dockers' Museum allows to build imaginative sequential geographies of historical maritime struggle. It presents a reading of six images, selected from the corpus of The Dockers' Museum and considers each image as a micro-historical narrative related to Sekula's interest in mutiny as a form of resistance. The analysis is informed by a close study of Allan Sekula's earlier project Fish Story (1989-1995) and essays, (unpublished) lectures, interviews and personal notebooks related to Fish Story. Taken together the images retrace a residual poetics of lost collectivities and outbursts of social conflict and connect instances of human agency that metonymically evoke the intersubjective dimension of work and struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Der amerikanische Dokumentarfotograf Allan Sekula (1951–2013) versteht Fotografie als radikale kulturelle Praxis. Die Kombination aus Fotografie und Text stellt eine neue Form der sozialen Dokumentation dar, die als kritischer Realismus bezeichnet wird. Seit den 1990er Jahren interessiert sich Sekula für die maritime Ökonomie, also für den Handel auf den Weltmeeren und die Containerlogistik in den Häfen weltweit. Sekula fotografiert die Rationalisierung des Transports durch die Erfindung des Containers, der die Globalisierung der Volkswirtschaften auf den See- und Landwegen vorangetrieben hat.

The explosion of the palm oil industry in recent decades has transformed vast swathes of the Malaysian and Indonesian countryside. Milica Topalovic, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at ETH Zurich, asserts that the resulting agro-industrial landscapes challenge the very concept of what is rural, and considers how such areas should be conceptualised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can, or should, social theory try to 'see it whole'? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the 'sociological imagination' and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an 'aesthetic of cognitive mapping'. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience with systemic constraints, knowledge with action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand. The article contrasts these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. It explores this contrast through the 'panorama' as a visual practice and a metaphor for theory itself. Against Latour's proposal to reduce and relativize totality, it argues that sociology can learn from contemporary artistic efforts to map social and economic power as a whole. 'Panoramic' projects in the arts, such as Allan Sekula's and Mark Lombardi's, can allow us to reflect on sociology's own deficit of imagination, and on the persistence of the desire to 'see it whole' - especially when that whole is opaque, fragmented, contradictory. A live sociology can only gain from greater attention to the critical experiments with forms and methods of representation that are being carried out by artists preoccupied with the staging of social totality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Marxist historiography, this essay examines the crowd as a marker for collective life in contemporary photography. In contrast to the mass media's demonisation of the 'mob' and art photography's evacuation of the crowd, it looks at three critical projects - Chris Marker's Staring Back; Allan Sekula's Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black); and Joel Sternfeld's Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa - that present a 'horizontal' image of the crowd from below which disfigures the view from above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Image & Narrative is the property of Image & Narrative and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)