Overview

This acute and overarching analysis of Allan Sekula’s documentary poetics illuminates his critique of neoliberal capitalism through photography, film and prose. The authors trace surprising paths through his practice emphasising not merely the depicted topics but also his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the relations between aesthetics and politics, they consider Sekula’s examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism. Day and Edwards show how Sekula’s purview ‘from below’ allies motley proletarians with ‘colour as comrade’. His project of radical documentary entwines allegorical reading with uneven and combined development. Horizontal montage is addressed through both Marxism’s value-form and post-Freudian ‘anal vision’. Serious subjects slide into sense of the absurd. Unexpectedly, the authors demonstrate how Sekula advances critical realism and ‘critical irrealism’. Approaching Sekula’s art afresh, they offer detailed interpretations of, among other works, Aerospace Folktales (1973), Fish Story (1995), Waiting for Tear Gas (1999-2000), and The Lottery of the Sea (2006).

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9781804295045

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Reviews

An audacity at once political and aesthetic, Allan Sekula's critical realist intervention--produced during the peak years of modernist consensus--emerges here in all its forceful untimeliness -- Kristin Ross, author of <i>The Politics and Poetics of Everyday life</i> This book is a major achievement. An unusually finely argued contribution to Marxist theory and aesthetics, it also stands as the most compelling analysis we have of the complex, richly evocative work of the major photographer and Marxist critical theorist and writer, Alan Sekula. In their tour de force study, Edwards and Day make us newly aware how Sekula is one of the very few recent artists whose work successfully mobilizes an imaginatively engaged poetics to affect a powerfully sustained, intellectually compelling analysis of the increasingly destructive material consequences of a modern capitalist political economy. Integral to the maritime world that comes alive in Sekula's 'Documentary Poetics' is a phantasmic disavowal of and fascination with the sea and associated commerce and labour, suggestively positioned in this outstanding study 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'. -- Alexander Potts

An audacity at once political and aesthetic, Allan Sekula's critical realist intervention--produced during the peak years of modernist consensus--emerges here in all its forceful untimeliness -- Kristin Ross, author of <i>The Politics and Poetics of Everyday life</i>

Author Information

Onetime steelworker and Northern Soul dance champion, Steve Edwards is now Professor of History & Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications have been translated into twelve languages and include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories; Photography: A Very Short Introduction; and Martha Rosler the Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems. He is an editorial member of Oxford Art Journal and the Historical Materialism Book Series, as well as a convenor for the research seminar Marxism in Culture. Gail Day’s Dialectical Passions: Negation and Postwar Art Theory was shortlisted for the Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Prize. She is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds. She co-convenes the Marxism in Culture research seminar. She collaborated on the research programme Aesthetic Form & Uneven Modernity with Centro de Estudos Desmanche e Formação de Sistemas Simbólicos at Universidade de São Paulo. Meeting Steve years later, she belonged to a rival faction at the same Black Country discos.

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