Initially, Allan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. Later, in 1974, he attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same university.
Initially, Allan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. Later, in 1974, he attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same university.
(Photographer and writer Allan Sekula constructs narrative...)
Photographer and writer Allan Sekula constructs narratives, that define land and its political, social and economic demarcations. He described "Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes" as a conjectural comparison of imaginary and material geographies in the advanced capitalist world. In the book, which is based on a 1986 exhibition, he examines the iconography, found in images of a landscape, altered by mining, of bank architecture and its messages of cultural stability, and of the land as a source of economic wealth as it appears on Canadian money.
(The "forgotten space" of Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's es...)
The "forgotten space" of Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's essay film is the sea, the oceans, through which 90% of the world's cargo now passes. At the heart of this space is the container box, which, since its invention in the 1950's, has become one of the most important mechanisms for the global spread of capitalism.
Allan Sekula was an outstanding American photographer, writer, filmmaker and theorist. He worked almost exclusively with photography and film, and his work touched on subjects, like the Cold War and the industrial economies of countries in Asia and Europe. Sekula was also a respected critic and historian, famous for his essay "Body and the Archive" (1986), which spoke of a photography as a political medium.
Background
Allan Sekula was born on January 15, 1951, in Erie, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the first of five children of Evelyn Shepard Sekula, a homemaker, and Ignace Sekula, a chemical engineer, who worked most of his life in the aerospace industry and the United States Air Force. In the early 1960's, the family settled down in San Pedro, California, United States, where Sekula continued to live until he started to attend a college and where he grew to love the sea and the rich culture, both social and maritime, of the harbor.
Education
Initially, Allan received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. Later, in 1974, he attained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the same university.
In the early 1970's, Sekula began staging performances and creating installations. Heavily influenced by the ports of San Pedro, Sekula’s works often focused on the shipping industry and ocean travel. Beginning with his work "Aerospace Folktales", created in 1973, he started mixing his photos with long texts, a format, for which he would become particularly well known. In addition, he collaborated with film theorist Noel Burch on the works "The Regan Tapes" and "The Forgotten Space", both of which investigated the politics of globalized capitalism. Shortly after receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1974, Allan began publishing widely-read articles, offering critiques of the social uses of photography and its anodyne embrace by the art world in "Artforum".
After briefly teaching at New York University's School of Cinema Studies, Sekula taught for five years in Ohio State University’s Department of Photography and Cinema, before returning in 1985 to Los Angeles to join the faculty of the Photography and Media Program of California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he taught till his death in 2013.
In the 2000's, Sekula began, what he humbly called his "apprenticeship as a filmmaker", although his films are among his most iconic and powerful works.
During his career, Allan took part in numerous exhibitions, including "Socialist Realism: Photo-Text Works by Fred Lonidier and Allan Sekula", Gallery A-402, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California (1973), "New American Filmmakers Series: Connell, Sekula and Torres", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (1976), "American Narrative/Story Art 1967-1977", Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (1977), "Art and Ideology", New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City (1984), "If You Lived Here: Home Front", Dia Art Foundation, New York City (1989), "Wasteland: Landscape from Now On", Fotografie Biennale, Rotterdam (1992), "Face a l’Histoire", Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (1996), "La mer n’est pas la terre", Le Criée, Rennes, France (1998), Rotterdam Foto Biennial, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2000), "Irrational Exuberance", Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (solo) (2002), "Contemporary Photography from the Harn Museum Collection", University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida (2003), "Los Angeles 1955-1985", Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2006), Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany (2007), "Learning for Life", group show, Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo, Norway (2013) and many others.
Allan Sekula was a brilliant photographer and filmmaker, who revitalized documentary photography, provided critical foundations for theorizing the relationship between word and image and was one of the earliest artists to cast a critical eye on globalization as a social phenomenon. Also, Sekula developed a style of photographic installation, that frequently combined modes of photography, cinema and literature, while drawing liberally from the conventions of conceptual art, postmodernism and the history of documentary photography.
Sekula was widely acknowledged as one of the most notable thinkers on photography and his influence as a critic is pervasive. He authored several books and many essays, that repositioned the status of the photographic image and revised its documentary status.
Sekula's interest in all manner of work - paid and unpaid, casual and unionized - and the changing maritime world led him to become one of the first artists to seriously consider the effects of containerized shipping on outsourced production and global trade. His work continues to influence artists and critics engaged with the depiction and discourse of class relations in contemporary society.
During his lifetime, Allan received many awards, fellowships and grants, including Art Critic's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1977 and 1980, Photographer's Fellowship from Ohio Arts Council in 1984, Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, Camera Austria Prize in 2001, Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 and many others.
In addition, in 2007, Allan was named the United States Broad Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an independent nonprofit and nongovernmental philanthropic organization.
Sekula's works are held in public collections of numerous museums, including the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, Spain; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Pompidou Center, Paris, France; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and others.
(The "forgotten space" of Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's es...)
2010
photo
Volunteer watching, volunteer smiling
Eyes closed assembly line
Dear Bill Gates (Triptych)
Shipyard Welder, Ensenada
Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November, 1993
Labor's Persistence
Portrait of Kaela Economou, beaten by the Seattle police, 2 December 1999, from "TITANIC'S wake"
Koreatown, Los Angeles, 1992, from "Fish Story"
Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor, from the series "Fish Story"
Remnants of a Roman harbor near Minturno, Italy, from the series "Fish Story"
Self-portrait
Volunteer on the edge
Dripping black trapezoid
Photo from "Aerospace Folktales"
Views
Allan considered the camera his tool for continuous social engagement and action, driven by what he called "the very mutability of the landscape, the sense of its ceaseless change and false facades". By conceiving what he called a "critical realism", Sekula tried to investigate the profound ambiguity of reality, always balanced between truth and fiction. He focused mainly on showing the "performed" everyday life of post-industrial workers and on depicting the sea as a forgotten space of late-capitalism.
Quotations:
"Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world."
"Documentary is thought to be art, when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist."
"Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them."
"The only objective truth, that photographs offer, is the assertion, that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture."
"The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message, that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability."
"Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy."
"How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?"
"The making of a human likeness on film is a political act."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"Allan had a remarkable, indomitable spirit. For over two years, from the first word, that his body could not be repaired, he fought against the inevitable with inner strength and grace. At first, he continued to travel for his work, then his many collaborators traveled to him so that several projects could move forward. He lost weight and he lost energy, but he never lost that keen eye and sharp mind, that saw so clearly, what was wrong with this world." - Thomas Lawson, an artist, writer, magazine editor and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts
Connections
Allan was married to Sally Stein, an art historian.
Father:
Ignace Sekula
Mother:
Evelyn Shepard Sekula
Wife:
Sally Stein
colleague:
Noël Burch
References
Allan Sekula: Facing the Music: Documenting Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles
Allan Sekula (1951–2013), photographer, artist, filmmaker, scholar, teacher and activist, devoted much of his life to the theory and practice of social documentary. This posthumous volume presents a collaborative exploration he initiated to examine downtown Los Angeles as its redevelopment peaked with the construction of Frank Gehry's cultural icon. Designed as an exploration of the impact of Gehry's building, the book challenges civic complacency by engaging a vital counter-tradition of social documentary investigation.
