AMPHIBIOUS REALITIES

AN ACUTE, OVERARCHING ANALYSIS OF ALLAN SEKULA’S PHOTOGRAPHY, FILM AND PROSE, ILLUMINATING HIS CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM

The photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks. This penetrating study pursues surprising paths through his practice, delineating the depicted top­ics as well as his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the rela­tions between aesthetics and politics, Gail Day and Steve Edwards consider Sekula’s examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism.

Onetime steelworker and Northern Soul dance champion, Steve Edwards is now Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Research Centre, the Courtauld Institute of Art. 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 Day’s 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 Formação de Sistemas Simbólicos at Universidade de São Paulo. Meeting Steve years later, she belonged to a rival faction at the same Black Country discos.