At the start of the seventies, Allan Sekula turned away from sculpture, and began working with photography in a bid to make his artistic production tie in more closely with social realities. Photography had been accepted as »museum-worthy« since the early sixties; however, it was still bound to modernistic art criteria: technical immanence, abstraction and autonomy. The lively leftist documentary culture that existed in the USA in the first third of the 20th century did not fit these criteria. For this reason, the »social documentary«, as produced by Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange, for example, at first remained nearly invisible. This amounted to a general absence of »social« subjects in the field of art: the lower classes, industrial labour, migration and labour conflicts were practically never to be found.
»Box Car« (1971) was the first work in which Allan Sekula drew consequences from his perception of the elitism that reigned in the culture industry. In his photograph, he began with the methods of »straight photography«, but then made them considerably more complicated in order to avoid, at all costs, the danger of being »picturesque«. »Box Car« shows a view of a deserted factory site taken from a moving goods van. This was not least a reference to a form of locomotion that was widespread in the period before mass motorisation, when hundreds of thousands of migrant workers roamed through the country as a highly mobile sub-proletariat – a social reality, incidentally, that also pervaded Frank Capra’s road movie »It Happened One Night« in 1934 with overwhelming directness. Sekula undermined the »depictive« approach of social photography by using a viewpoint that was multiply charged with subjectivity. With a sort of sub-proletarian mimicry, he took up the position of a hobo and drew attention to a factory in which he himself once worked. This shift of perspective was what constituted the main difference with regard to the photographs of the thirties. Sekula countered the »true« picture with the »complicated« picture, which, even though superficially very simple, could accommodate a large number of interwoven levels while at the same time documenting a contemporary American industrial landscape. »Box Car« also already brought together themes and motifs that would be important for Sekula’s later works: transport, social specificity, and a respect for physical labour in a sphere that was otherwise not very receptive for such materialities.
In »Untitled Slide Sequence« (1972), Sekula changed to a sequential method and now photographed people: workers leaving a factory. This recalled the facticity of Lumière films; but here, too, there was an important difference: the crowd of people moving towards the camera shows itself through this movement to be composed of very different individuals. Sekula thus seems to have renewed the avowed aim of the social documentary: the representation of things that are otherwise distorted or not shown at all.
Having roots in the leftist photo-documentary tradition also meant, however, taking account of the counter-cultural institutions that contributed to its acceptance. The New York »Film and Photo League« was a place of refuge for a number of important documentarists. The League was a subsidiary of International Workers’ Aid, and in the USA, too, cultural work was connected with politico-cultural objectives: to promote the self-representation of proletarian subjectivity, thus promoting its own interests and, not least, to produce a counter-balance to mass-media images, which were no less brusque, distortionary and false in their discriminatory intent back then than they are today. There was a desire to promote a form of documentarism that did not become over-aestheticised and stop at merely depicting the misery, but was aimed, above all, at bringing about political mobilisation. These objectives were not at all dissimilar to those of the state-run Farm Service Agency (FSA), which branched out into the field of social photography in the thirties, commissioning an army of photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, to document concrete locations of the Depression.
The fact that Sekula looked at these pictures at the distance of several decades, however, had also accentuated their tendencies towards the picturesque and sentimental, and not only because – particularly in Lange’s works – rural settings predominated. The weather-beaten faces, sad expressions and shabby surroundings could also, at this distance in time, pass for emotional, depoliticised pictures of a universal despondency, not a historically specific one. At any rate, such pictures of poverty were no longer suitable as models for a contemporary representation of proletarian subjectivity. Furthermore, if Michel Foucault’s theories, for example, are not to be disregarded, every portrait, every objectivist depiction of a human being is inscribed with the desire to keep bureaucratic records passed down from the nineteenth century, obsessed as it was with social and bodily techniques. A photographic concept that was naïve or even had stylistic originality as its object was thus incompatible with an artistic practice that wanted to »socially dimensionalise« itself. The picture had to become considerably fuller.
In Sekula’s eyes, this made it necessary, for instance, to document one’s own social background. He did this in »Aerospace Folktales« (1973), a study of the world in which his parents lived. This at first involves the tale of a fragile move upwards in society. Having escaped the proletariat by virtue of a university education, Sekula’s father worked in various positions in the weapons industry on the West Coast. Despite the family’s middle-class status, it remained living in a working-class district; but his parents attempted to set themselves apart by ordering books with a »cultural« aura or establishing a meticulous household regime. Sekula describes his parents as accumulators of values that had no relation to reality and that were maintained even when the economic basis had been pulled out from under this arrangement. His father became unemployed in the post-Vietnam recession, but remained undeterred in his adherence to petty bourgeois, neo-liberal thought patterns. His being unemployed produced feelings of guilt, but no political understanding of his own situation, while the neighbouring fork-lift driver »didn’t need a high school education to know who was getting screwed« (Sekula). Sekula notes this fact without any condescension, but showed his parents almost only in their various domestic interiors.
»Aerospace Folktales« was Allan Sekula’s largest work up to then. For it, he used a very varied photographic vocabulary: full length and half length, long shots, detail shots, still lifes and group portraits. In pairs of pictures, motifs were doubled and their meanings subjected to a slight shift. This all gave the impression of an unmethodical procedure. The complete sociological picture only arose in combination with texts, picture captions, interviews and commentaries. The arrangement of »Aerospace Folktales« already contained all the elements that Sekula uses in his works, including the most recent ones, with one difference: from this point onwards, he only photographed people in public contexts.
In »This Ain’t China: A Photonovel« (1974), he described a working world that was rationalised right down to its aesthetic and emotional areas. Here, again, he took personal experiences as a point of departure. After this, however, he increasingly freed the theme of work from such biographical strictures. Then, at the start of the nineties, Sekula found a leitmotif that was to have a lasting and determining effect, metaphorically and geographically, on his range of themes: the sea.
It first makes an appearance in »War without Bodies« (1991).Whereas the title alludes to the fiction of a distanced, unphysical form of warfare introduced since the 1991 Iraq war, the photos give the viewer a contrasting picture: visitors to a military exhibition put their index fingers in the mouths of a multi-barrelled machine gun. The texts accompanying this work link the pictures with stories of the USA’s rise to become an imperialist maritime power, of pretexts for war, and of attempts to neutralise the notorious refractoriness of seamen, a trait that was recognised even before »Battleship Potemkin«.
In Sekula’s works, the sea also has a peculiar kind of pictorial dimension that distorts the normal geographical view. In them, the sea is a non-territory, an immense intervening space that is densely crossed by the structures of world trade, its social conditions, deregulations and resistances. In a way, Sekula’s sea is the equivalent to the »country« of Dorothea Lange’s works, with the one difference that romanticised readings do not work here. The sea is more a source of raw material, a production centre, an area for traffic and storage. But, despite this, it is strangely inexistent in the public’s awareness, something Sekula has tried to change, particularly with his works of the nineties. But in contrast to Ernst Jünger, who was interested in the sea chiefly because of the dictatorial situation found on ships and the total breakdown of social behaviour during accidents at sea, Allan Sekula sees the sea not least as a means of connection.
In »Freeway to China« (1998/99), Sekula documented the radical changes that have affected the running of ports in the past few decades: rationalisation effects through the introduction of containers, an increase in »flag of convenience« traffic, an aggressive worldwide fight against unions, which was carried out particularly rigorously and successfully by Margaret Thatcher in England. The introduction of the container was also a kind of reaction to the political »unreliability« of the dock workers, but rationalisation and deregulation of labour markets has also produced new forms of resistance. In this regard, Allan Sekula is a Negrian: the globalisation of companies has turned dock workers, too, into globally operative subjects, and gives rise to activities and solidarities that disregard all borders. In the mid-ninetines, Japanese unionists went on strike in solidarity with their counterparts in Liverpool.
An action carried out by the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) also fits this picture. In 1998, this union bought the »Global Mariner«, a cargo ship ready for the scrap heap, and for two years sent it around the big ports of the world as a mobile exhibition venue in order to inform people there about the exploitation taking place in the maritime transport business. In Sekula’s estimation, the dockers were the real forerunners of the anti-globalisation movement anyway. The relatively little-known fact that they also took part in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 was one more reason to document this resistance movement – the largest on American soil since the sixties – in »Waiting for Tear Gas« (1999/2000). Sekula’s concept here reflected the criticism of the media expressed by Peter Watkins in his monumental documentation »The Journey« (1985): that they only ever report from the safe, police side of things. Seattle is not only the town where a WTO conference took place and a port city; it is also where one finds the headquarters of Microsoft and Bill Gates’s place of residence. His house is situated by the sea and contains the painting »Lost on the Grand Banks« by Winslow Homer. This painted form of early American social documentarism from the year 1885 was bought by Gates at a price that set new standards on the market for 19th-century American painting. However, in the three-part photographic work »Dear Bill Gates« (1999), which shows a twilight view of Gates’s villa in the background and Allan Sekula swimming in the foreground, the evidence seems to harden of a somewhat too smooth, systematic method of accumulation and references. This abundance of references increasingly shifts to Sekula’s essays, whose vehement desire to inform sometimes gives way under their richness of language.
One returns to the photographs and looks at the links between them. In »TITANIC’s Wake« (1998-2000), the photograph of a fish being brutally held in the picture is followed by the Bilbao Guggenheim by Frank Gehry, with its equally metallic sheen. A pan of 45 degrees is enough to assign to this familiar view the touristically useless commercial zone that this museum site still basically represents. The tension produced by slight shifts is still one of Sekula’s most important techniques, not least when depicting people. Two phases, two manners of representation: once with face buried, deep in work; then looking directly into the camera as an act of sovereign communication. But there is no reason either to fundamentally criticise Sekula’s text-picture arrangements. Even with a title like »Union President«, reminiscent of August Sander, the photo of Louisa Gratz in »Freeway to China« would not convey much more than the photographer’s willingness to draw up a sociological cadastre. The text of several lines is needed to explain the function of this woman and the circumstances surrounding her presence in the picture.
When people today speak of »social«, they mostly mean an ill-defined context at the lower edge of society. Work or, indeed, »working class« anyway tends to be seen as archaic, heroic, vulgar or dreary. Allan Sekula constantly bends such assessments into shape by retelling submerged stories, drawing attention to the lesser-known, putting information in new contexts, and thus giving his pictures a political angle: politics in the sense of permanent negotiation.

Allan Sekula, »Performance under Working Conditions«, Generali Foundaiton, Vienna, 16 May to 17 August 2003. A comprehensive catalogue was issued for the exhibition; the book »TITANIC’s Wake: Fotos von Allan Sekula«, Graz 2003, published by the journal »CAMERA AUSTRIA«, has also recently appeared.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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