Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula

(, Paperback original)

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This acute and overarching analysis of Allan Sekulas 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 Sekulas examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism. Day and Edwards show how Sekulas 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 Marxisms 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 Sekulas 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).

Reviews

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
This book is a major achievement. An unusually finely argued contribution to Marxist theory and aesthetics, it also stands as the most compelling analysis we have of the complex, richly evocative work of the major photographer and Marxist critical theorist and writer, Alan Sekula. In their tour de force study, Edwards and Day make us newly aware how Sekula is one of the very few recent artists whose work successfully mobilizes an imaginatively engaged poetics to affect a powerfully sustained, intellectually compelling analysis of the increasingly destructive material consequences of a modern capitalist political economy. Integral to the maritime world that comes alive in Sekula's 'Documentary Poetics' is a phantasmic disavowal of and fascination with the sea and associated commerce and labour, suggestively positioned in this outstanding study 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'. -- Alexander Potts
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 and interpretive tact. -- T.J. Clark
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 *
This book is a major achievement. An unusually finely argued contribution to Marxist theory and aesthetics, it also stands as the most compelling analysis we have of the complex, richly evocative work of the major photographer and Marxist critical theorist and writer, Alan Sekula. In their tour de force study, Edwards and Day make us newly aware how Sekula is one of the very few recent artists whose work successfully mobilizes an imaginatively engaged poetics to effect a powerfully sustained, intellectually compelling analysis of the increasingly destructive material consequences of a modern capitalist political economy. Integral to the maritime world that comes alive in Sekula's Documentary Poetics is a phantasmic disavowal of and fascination with the sea and associated commerce and labour, suggestively positioned in this outstanding study 'between the devil and the deep blue sea'. -- Alex Potts, author of Flesh and the Ideal

Author Bio

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 Days 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 Formao de Sistemas Simblicos at Universidade de So Paulo. Meeting Steve years later, she belonged to a rival faction at the same Black Country discos.