Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula

by Gail Day, Steve Edwards

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781804295069
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320

About the Author

Steve Edwards is Professor of History & Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London. 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.

Editorial Reviews

"An audacity at once political and aesthetic, Allan Sekula's critical realist intervention—produced during the peak years of modernist consensus—emerges here in all its forceful untimeliness"
—Kristin Ross, author of The Politics and Poetics of Everyday life

"How does a Marxist make a picture of the world of the commodity? What would a photography be like that set itself the task of showing us labour – labour in the concrete and the abstract – as it is forced into form in the world of ‘supply chains’ and ‘human rights abuses’? Is it possible to portray the machinery of inequality and immiseration, as opposed to its usual victims and beneficiaries? (Haven’t we been asked too often to pity the one and rage at the other?) Alan Sekula spent his life struggling with such questions, and his photography remains a great testament to one man’s determination, curiosity, hard thinking and visual intuition. Gail Day and Steve Edwards have written the essential book about him, following his footsteps with just the right measure of detective doggedness, Marxist sympathy and interpretive tact."
—T.J. Clark

"This book is a major achievement. An unusually finely argued contribution to Marxist theory and aesthetics, it also stands as the most compelling analysis we have of the complex, richly evocative work of the major photographer and Marxist critical theorist and writer, Alan Sekula. In their tour de force study, Edwards and Day make us newly aware how Sekula is one of the very few recent artists whose work successfully mobilizes an imaginatively engaged poetics to effect a powerfully sustained, intellectually compelling analysis of the increasingly destructive material consequences of a modern capitalist political economy. Integral to the maritime world that comes alive in Sekula’s Documentary Poetics is a phantasmic disavowal of and fascination with the sea and associated commerce and labour, suggestively positioned in this outstanding study ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’."
—Alex Potts, author of Flesh and the Ideal

"Gail Day and Steve Edwards document the discovery of full scope in his photography and understand the stakes. Reality mattered greatly to Allan Sekula, but so did utopian possibility. Amphibious Realities analyzes the prospects, bleak and difficult, before him and us. This book will be both the road map to the different lands travelled by Sekula and a tool kit for those wanting to take photography further now. Call it a navigation guide. Call it indispensable."
—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair, Vassar College

From the Publisher