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Trajectory

Erie, Pennsilvania (USA), 1951

Since he abandoned performance art in the early seventies, when he challenged U.S. military policy and the Vietnam War, Allan Sekula's work has become a reflection on the place and function of reportage in social and artistic contexts. His first photographic series were focused on his own experiences and his immediate surroundings, such as the Chinese restaurant where he worked in This Ain't China (1974) or the his night school in School is a factory (1978-1980), although his intention was not to document a specific aspect but to extrapolate on general concepts.

After an initial phase in the late seventies and early eighties in which he adopted the strategies of conceptual art in his photographs, Sekula, who is also a critic and essayist, turned to investigating the narrative and critical capacity of straight photography and exploring the theatrical element of this photographic genre, which has been mistaken for an objective and neutral representation of the reality it portrays. The conceptual inheritance can be appreciated in his inclination to relate texts and images: the titles of the photographs and the informative panels he introduces into his exhibition projects create political, cultural and personal associations with the images they identify or explain. Sekula tries to distance himself, despite the dramatic situations represented, from the manipulative sentimentalism photojournalism has become.

His reportage has a poignant element of censure and it is usually focused on the personal effort of people fighting against the social injustices created by the current tendency toward a globalised economy, or of those who find themselves indirectly immersed, as the wronged party, in daily struggles against the homogenizing strategies of liberal capitalism. This element has led many to consider that his work pertains to social realism, a historically transcendental movement.

Some of Sekula's documentary projects focus on specific events, such as his photographs of the anti-globalisation demonstrations that took place in Seattle in 1999, or his most recent series about the ecological catastrophe caused by the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker on the coast of Galicia, Spain. Others are work-in-progress such as Fish Story (1987-1994) in which he explores the transformations that have come about in the labour conditions of fishermen due to the growing internationalisation of the world economy, or Dead Letter Office (1996-1997), commissioned by InSITE, which is an exhaustive study of the economic, political and social context on the Mexican - U.S. border. S. R.