Photographic Locations: Allan Sekula

"I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital."

From "Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999-2000." © Allan Sekula

In 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle & Beyond (Verso, 2000) Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair report enthusiastically on the anti-WTO demonstrations that took place in Seattle in the fall of 1999. Their text is accompanied by 30 photographs by Allan Sekula under the title "Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black]." The photograph shown here, which may well be the most poignant of the series, and the text quoted above, are from Sekula's section of the book which he describes as "anti-photojournalism" because it is preoccupied less with capturing a "defining image" than with conveying "the lulls, the waiting and the margins of events." I will set aside the possibility that, despite his efforts, Sekula might well have made a defining image. I also will set aside the vexing question of whether Sekula's photo-essay constitutes "art." I am more interested here in the trajectory of the photograph and how that trajectory reflects and effects the way it is used.

I was reminded of this image because I am re-reading Julian Stallabrass's terrific art INCORPORATED (Oxford UP, 2004)* for my undergraduate class this term. Stallabrass adopts a no-nonsense neo-Marxist approach, portraying the putative "freedom" of contemporary art as largely illusory and suggesting that that illusion distorts the multiple ways the art world functions to support advanced capitalism. I don't buy a lot of what Stallbrass peddles, but the book is both very smart and an exemplar of this sort of analysis. Among the places where I find Stallabrass especially flat-footed is in his assessment of Alfredo Jaar as tacitly lending support to "neoliberal values." And the reason that the Sekula image struck me is that Stallabrass presents it (pages 195-201), by way of contrast, as art that resists the pull of capitalism and its servants among art world elites. Sekula's "Waiting for Tear Gas," acording to Stallabrass, exemplifies"the political use of art" which helps expose the "contradictions" in "the logic of capital" precisely to the extent that, in it, "corporate sponsorship and museum curatorship do not define what is seen."

It seemed to me on first reading that this sort of blunt contrast illuminated the shortcomings of Stallabrass's theoretical commitments. I plan to push my students on this point. So, I went to the web, searching for a copy of the image that I could show in class. Ironically (and conveniently for my argument) I discovered that Sekula's image apparently has migrated from a small text published by a lefty press to the permanent collection of the Swiss Fotomuseum Winterthur. Perhaps it has lodged itself in other prestigious locations as well, thereby falling sway to the vicissitudes of "corporate sponsorship and museum curatorship." How and why might this migration compromise the political uses to which Sekula's work can be put?
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* OUP has repackaged this book as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (2006).