Allan Sekula is an artist, writer, and critic. He was born in 1951 in Erie, Pennsylvania. He studied art, philosophy, and other subjects in college and graduate school. Like many students of his generation, he was greatly influenced by the turbulent events of the 1960s, especially the Vietnam War and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Many of his more recent photographic projects consist of sequences of photographs and texts that critically examine the economic, political, social, and cultural changes wrought by globalization. These theoretical investigations, however, are always grounded in the concrete experiences of specific groups and communities. Sekula lives in Los Angeles.
Sekula took up photography in the early 1970s. His formative influences included Marxist theory, documentary photography, and the Conceptual art movement of the late 1960s. One of his most important early works is Aerospace Folktales (1973). In this work, which originally consisted of three separate narrative elements (photographs, a spoken sound track, and a written commentary), he documented the impact of unemployment in a working-class family.
This project and the ones that followed exemplify Sekula's conception of "critical realism." He described this concept in his book Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984):
I wanted to construct works from within concrete life situations, situations within which there was an overt or active clash of interests and representations. Any interest that I had in artifice and constructed dialogue was part of a search for a certain "realism," a realism not of appearances or social facts but of everyday experience in and against the grip of advanced capitalism.
Sekula's photographic project Fish Story (1989-95) is a particularly important example of his critical realism. The third in a series of works focusing on what he describes as "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world," it is the result of extensive research and travel. Conceived as both an exhibition and a book, it consists of a sequence of color photographs and texts examining the impact of globalization on persons in various countries through the lens of the transformation of the international shipping industry and maritime world—"a world," he writes, of . . . automation, but also of persistent work, of isolated, anonymous, hidden work, of great loneliness, displacement, and separation from the domestic sphere. For that reason, it's interesting to find the social in the sea." Other projects that expand on these investigations include Freeway to China (1998-99), TITANIC's wake (1998-2000), and Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] (1999-2000), which he made in the United States during protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999.
Recently, Sekula has completed Prayer for the Americans. This photographic project was originally motivated by a hypothetical prayer written after the disastrous collision of a U.S. nuclear submarine and a Japanese fisheries training ship in the summer of 2001. It was then reconceived in the aftermath of the tragic course of subsequent world events. It asks whether a series of photographs can constitute a prayer or "merely" a record of events.