Between photography and document. Interview with Allan Sekula
Allan Sekula: My name is Allan Sekula. I’m a writer, photographer, filmmaker, maybe some people would say artist, from Los Angeles.
It doesn’t seem to me that photography has an entirely fixed position within the system of the arts and for me it’s always been interesting that photography had no stable home, that it’s a literary art. I mean, even Clement Greenberg, who in every other respect was defending the idea of the autonomy of modernist arts, in the late 1940s spoke of his preference for Walker Evans over Edward Weston precisely because Evans understood the literary qualities and narrative qualities of the photograph. I also think that because still photography is at the basis of cinema, you have this strange relation to the moving image.
I’m more interested in multiplicity than I am in trying to distil a unique essence of photography, though I do feel that there are certain fundamental conditions of the photographic and I’m not entirely dismissive of that, but what one then does with the conditions of presentation, of deployment or with the dispositif of photography.
I’ve been working on projects that try to continue the idea of social documentary, but from a point of view that has been refracted through some of the lessons of conceptual art, of semiotics, of cultural theory of the last half century or so.
I would say that the institutional mode of photography as document is archival, but what I would defend at the level of practice would be something that is in some ways anti-archival, a kind of discursive articulation of possibilities of meaning that are not reducible to the archival paradigm.
The paradigm is a kind of substitution set that allows us to pick this image, that image, to organise images. Of course many artists have come to the conclusion that demonstrating that archives exist is an act of critique, but I think it’s simply a bureaucratic way of describing what bureaucratic handling of images already does.
I think one can separate the problem of the archive as a kind of problem of art history or cultural history or photographic history from the work that one does as an artist. I separate these things. To me, overly severe archivalism leads to repetition of rather banal models – the model of the list – and I really am interested in something that is discursively more complex, more like an essay, some sort of economy of the image that involves elimination, editing, cutting, montage. And increasingly I think what interests me is finding the minimum number of images that work.
I think it’s important to recognise that still photography is largely an art of silence and the photographic book is silent. The only sound maybe is the sound of your fingers on the paper. Whereas film – if one is making a sound film – you’re dealing with music, with the ambient sound, with the human voice, perhaps the sounds of animals and these are all there as a kind of panoply of acoustical vibrations that are as powerful as the optical vibrations of the image. So you have to work with that. It’s very different. The more I’ve come into working with film, the more I recognise that difference. I find the silence of photography much more profound, having worked with sound.
The Forgotten Space. A Film Essay by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch
Well, the sea – I think one thing we have to take a certain distance from is this idea of a kind of emptied out metaphor of the sea that we find when people talk about ‘surfing the web’ or ‘surfing the Internet’, you know the kind of maritime language has entered the discourse of the new economy. And yet the new economy evokes the language of the sea only in a way to suppress it. So I think that one has to confront that problem first. Both a forgetting of the real sea and a metaphorisation of the sea that basically is another form of forgetting.
If the sea kills us – and of course we know the sea has had this killing power for centuries, what does it mean now that we have the capacity to kill the sea, as we see from Fukushima, as we see from everything that is happening. There’s an urgency now to rethink it, and I think it’s partly a matter for climatologists and oceanographers and geophysicists and people doing public policy, but it’s also something for artists to confront. The problem is not so much forgetting the sea but the wrong kind of remembering of it.
