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 a 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).