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Allan Sekula: Photography Against Illusion and Towards Critical Realism

Allan Sekula is an American photographer, filmmaker, writer, critic, and activist most

renowned for his works that depict conditions of workers in the global maritime economy, as

well as for his critical essays that accompany those works. While Sekula often addresses

questions of class and labor, in a broader context, his works of photographs also self-consciously

distance themselves from two predominant traditions of 20th century photography he deems

problematic: estheticism and neutrality. This essay will assess what specific concerns the artist

finds troubling in each of these traditions respectively, how his works respond to those issues,

and what he hopes to achieve through his practice. Then, I will delve into one of his photographs

titled Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993 and analyze its significance in light of his overall

commitment to critical realism.

The trend in the 20th century photography that Sekula first tackles is estheticism, the term

he uses to explain the trend that sought to raise the position of photography to that of genres

considered as ‘high art’ at the time such as painting, drawing, and sculpture. This trend also

stems from serious photographers’ efforts (those who made meticulously developed photographs

as opposed to quick snapshots) to distinguish themselves from more casual photographers; the

latter group has exponentially grown in number by the end of 19th century and more so after the

invention of Kodak’s Brownie camera in 1900, which made photography easy and accessible to

a wide public.

Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907) (see fig. 1) is a great example of art photography.

Stieglitz is someone who brought fine art photography from Europe to the United States and

actively promoted photography as fine art. He believed that in order for photography to be taken

seriously, it should not copy or mimic painting, but rather do something that painting cannot do,
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hence advocating “the model of autonomous aesthetic endeavor” devoted to anti-utilitarian

avant-garde, as Sekula puts in the introduction of his book Photography Against the Grain (xii).

The Steerage is one of his most famed works that depict scenes of contemporary life in a

straightforward manner, deviating from his earlier photos that rendered painterly images of

Symbolist subject matters. In this image of European immigrants densely packed in the steerage,

one sees internal logics and rhythms formed by patterns of lines, shapes, and a variety of hues

ranging between black and white; the circular shape of the white hat in the upper half of the

image is repeated in the drum-like object located at the bottom left corner; long cylinder poles,

decking boards, and a ladder frame the entire image in a way that leads the spectator’s eyes from

borders into the center, and vice versa.

Sekula, however, sees these kinds of avant-garde, modernist works, and more importantly

the photographic discourse around such works, as limiting the possibility of meaning and too

removed from the world. One could say that the organization of shapes and spaces in The

Steerage is interesting and even beautiful, but it says near to nothing about the lives of these

immigrants, and as a result one could potentially criticize it as a dehumanizing work in which

individuals are only represented as mere shapes and forms. Furthermore, because of this lack of

explanation for contexts, the human experience is often attributed to the person of the

photographer and his ‘genius mind.’ Sekula believes that such transfers of photographic art into a

mystical realm is equal to an act of closure that precludes precise understanding of the image and

solidifies and reinforces the powers that appropriates it. Moreover, he contends that art

photography presents photographs as precious objects of craftsmanship, as fetish objects or

documents. Equipped with the mass production and circulation of image, photography has the

power to inform and affect the spectator in certain ways, as the artist describes in On the
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Invention of Photography, an essay in Photography Against the Grain. Since the efforts to

establish photography as art led to transformation of photographs into fetishized artifacts and

delineation of a clear boundary between photography and its contexts, Sekula declares that such

efforts produced what he calls “the ills of estheticism”: the loss of social and historical contexts

which are necessary for accurate apprehension of the works and their meanings (16).

Neutrality is another tradition and ideology of the 20th century photography, mostly

esteemed by documentary photography, that the artist finds problematic. What he means by

neutrality is closely related to the notion of ‘photographic truth’ or ‘photographic realism’: a

naïve belief that a single image can express all truth and essence pertaining to that image. Instead

of seeing photographs as embedded with the producer’s and users’ intentions or purposes, the

ideology of neutrality assumes that photographs are objective and unbiased, and thus makes a

singular conclusion based on what the image portrays. In other words, it neglects critical

understanding of contexts that shape the photographs, which include but are not limited to: the

artist’s intent, the work’s commission, exhibition, and circulation, and the work’s relationship to

time, history, and memory. Allan Sekula believes that such misunderstanding and or rejection of

the contexts of the pictures actually stems from positivism that wants to instrumentalize those

images to serve an ideology or ideologies of the powerful. He writes in Dismantling Modernism,

Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation, another essay from the same

book: “The only “objective” truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or

something – in this case, an automated camera – was somewhere and took a picture. Everything

else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs” (57). As this statement

describes, a photograph itself can never be “neutral” or “impartial,” and thus, the prevalent
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perception of photography as a universal language capable of showing “the essence” of the

depicted scene or moment is misleading; art is always political.

Nick Ut’s very famous photograph Napalm Girl (see fig. 2) demonstrates how the

supposed neutrality of traditional documentary photography can be wrong. This image from

1972 encapsulates the terror of the United States’ war in Vietnam – the indigenous children of a

Vietnamese village are running towards the camera in pain following the bombing (captured in

the background of the photo), and the naked girl in the middle is screaming with her mouth wide

open. This photo shocked the American public as well as the rest of the world, and contributed to

Americans’ strong demand for the U.S. government to withdraw its military from the war.

However, behind the iconic status of this image (it appeared in The New York Times the day after

it was photographed, and also won a Pulitzer Prize) for capturing “the decisive moment” – a

concept touted by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who is often considered as the

father of street photography – during the U.S. war in Vietnam, there is an artistic intervention by

the photographer that most people don’t know about: this photograph was in fact carefully

manipulated by the photographer to emphasize the agony of the subject. The uncropped version

(see fig. 3) reveals that Ut cropped out the right part of the original to remove the solder who is

loading his camera, and the photographer did so probably because he thought that this detail

would be distracting for the message he wants to convey, and also because he wanted to place

the naked girl in the center, in order to draw immediate attention to her. Such editing process is

just one example that illustrates how often the presence and influence of photographic works’

makers are set aside in the tradition of documentary photography. The same applies for press

companies that release such works, institutions such as museum and gallery spaces that exhibit

them in specific frameworks, and governments and corporates that exert pressure on those public
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spheres and appropriate the images for their means and purposes. Put another way, in the process

of creation, circulation, and preservation, critical discourse around documentary photographs

tend to focus only on the singular, iconic shots and by doing so significantly lose their contexts.

Allan Sekula finds that the aforementioned problems in the traditions of documentary

photography and their continuation in contemporary photography are deeply rooted in bourgeois

values and cultures, along with the inequalities that the capitalist system engenders. He writes in

Photography Against the Grain that these issues are part of “a failure of petit-bourgeois

optimism” and a failure of ideology to provide adequate interpretation of the world we live in

(70). Hence, many of Sekula’s works are a response to not only the aforementioned traditions

within the history of photography, estheticism and neutrality, but also the ideologies and power

structures these traditions serve.

His work Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993 (see fig. 4) from Fish Story is one

that shows how the artist successfully addresses contemporary sociopolitical concerns, while

simultaneously preserving essential contexts that are attached to his photographic endeavor. Fish

Story is a book that has series of photographs Sekula made during his extensive travels to

traditional ports around the world. His strong interest in international markets and networks

revolving around goods, knowledge, money, power, and individual experiences led him to follow

the ports and workers there to study and expose the global power, economic developments, and

more importantly, human sacrifices that enable such power structures to thrive – which are,

unfortunately, often invisible in our mainstream media. He is extremely careful in telling these

stories, however. Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993, when singled out from the series,

could be easily read as a beautiful panorama image of steel container boxes traveling in the

ocean; the pattern of boxes’ colors, the contrast between the ocean’s turbulent waves and silver
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linings in the background, and the manmade objects juxtaposed with the sublime nature are some

of the examples of reading that the spectator can elicit from looking at this image. However,

Sekula intends to show more than such interpretations and abstractions of the photograph; he

never presents the work as a singular image that stands on its own by capturing the essence or

even beauty of the depicted scene, a problem that frequently arises in both of the ideology of

estheticism and that of neutrality. Instead, he makes it clear that the work is a part of series, a

part of his intellectual study on the issues of industrial labor’s productions and conditions. In

addition, Sekula is also fully aware of the important role that art collections and archives play in

preserving the contexts. For instance, he does not let art galleries select and sell individual

photographs to collectors, because he is worried that the separation could risk losing the specific

contexts that are attached to those works. Although there are limits as to what extent he can exert

influence in such situations, not to mention the unstoppable digital circulation of his images, the

artist nonetheless tries his best to control the afterlife of his works. For him, reality is never

automatically built into the medium of photography and it is something that constantly changes

depending on the circumstances that photos are placed into.

In light of the concept of committed art, which I investigated in another paper, On the

Concepts of Committed Art and Committed Artists, Sekula’s artistic practice seems very

committed overall. On the one hand, it relies on photography’s autonomy, in other words, what

only photography can do and other artistic mediums cannot; Hilde van Gelder and Jan Baetens

explain in the introduction of Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s

Photography that photography has a causal and indexical relationship to reality, meaning that a

camera can easily capture a given time or space and quickly produce a visual display of that

exact moment or space through the camera (9). On the other hand, Sekula’s practice also relies
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on the artistic freedom to intervene during and or after the production of their images, such as

framing the shots, using unique angles, cropping out certain details, and combining multiple

images together. His photographs are highly crafted and often aesthetically pleasing. Sekula

makes great efforts to maintain tensions between the inevitable indexicality to the reality that the

medium of photography has and artificiality that results from the artist’s intervention.

Furthermore, by accompanying the works with his writings, he also draws attention to other

forms of artificiality such as discourse on the tradition of documentary photography and art

history, art market, art institutions, press, and circulation of images in cyberspaces.

Through his works, Allan Sekula not only reveals multiple layers of settings and

circumstances (which include the social and political backgrounds) underneath the appearances

of the images, but also presents new ways of representing the real. He tackles the concept of

realism differently from both the traditional art photography and traditional documentary

photography, and yet does not completely abandon one in favor of another. Sekula’s concern is

neither to establish photography as fine art like Alfred Stieglitz did, nor to capture the “essence”

in a single image like Nick Ut did. Instead, he brings to light the limits in each model of

photographic practice, by perpetuating the tension between them. By doing so, he also uncovers

performativity of photography – its power to act instead of merely documenting and presenting

the truth(s). As Hilde van Gelder and Jan Baetens expatiate in their note, the concept of realism

is no longer limited to photographic realism, as it has been historicized and came to possess

multiple meanings; realism is never simply mimetic, but rather productive because it invents new

ways of presenting the world (Baetens 7-8). Sekula, then, is a photographer who hopes to

contribute to critical realism by exposing the limits in the past models of realism (namely, the

ideology of estheticism in art photography and the ideology of neutrality in documentary

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photography), as well as presenting a more multidimensional approach or perspective in creating

and interpreting photography.

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Figures

Fig. 1. Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, 1907

Fig. 2. Nick Ut, Napalm Girl, 1972

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Fig. 3. Nick Ut, The Terror of War, 1972

Fig. 4. Allan Sekula, Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993, 1993

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Works Cited

Baetens, Jan, and Hilde Van Gelder. Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula's

Photography. Leuven: Leuven University, 2010.

Sekula, Allan. Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993. In Fish Story. 2nd ed. Richter Verlag,

2002.

Sekula, Allan. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973-1983. Halifax: Press

of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984.

Stieglitz, Alfred. The Steerage. 1907. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Accessed August 14,

2018. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/33.43.419/.

Ut, Nick. The Terror of War. 1972. In TIME 100 Photos. Accessed August 14, 2018.

http://100photos.time.com/photos/nick-ut-terror-war.

Ut, Nick. Napalm Girl. 1972. In PRI. Accessed August 14, 2018. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-

02-21/how-vietnam-wars-napalm-girl-found-hope-after-tragedy.