Amphibious Realities

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).

Author Biography

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.