Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula [Paperback]

AN ACUTE, OVERARCHING ANALYSIS OF ALLAN SEKULA’S PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM AND PROSE, ILLUMINATING HIS CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM

The photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks. This penetrating study pursues surprising paths through his practice, delineating the depicted top­ics as well as his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the rela­tions between aesthetics and politics, Gail Day and Steve Edwards consider Sekula’s examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism. 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 The Politics and Poetics of Everyday life

How does a Marxist make a picture of the world of the commodity? What would a photography be like that set itself the task of showing us labour – labour in the concrete and the abstract – as it is forced into form in the world of ‘supply chains’ and ‘human rights abuses’? Is it possible to portray the machinery of inequality and immiseration, as opposed to its usual victims and beneficiaries? (Haven’t we been asked too often to pity the one and rage at the other?) Alan Sekula spent his life struggling with such questions, and his photography remains a great testament to one man’s determination, curiosity, hard thinking and visual intuition. Gail Day and Steve Edwards have written the essential book about him, following his footsteps with just the right measure of detective doggedness, Marxist sympathy alƒ}