Case Study 1 – Alan Sekula. I chose Alan Sekula’s piece Aerospace Folktales as on the surface he is exploring family and archives to create something new. I chose to compare this work to Sekula’s essay The Body and the Archive,which was published many years after Aerospace Folk Tales was made.
Alan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, theorist, film maker and critic. Active from the early 1970’s till his death in 2013. Over his professional life time themes he focused on included: family life, work and unemployment to schooling and the military complex, and globalization.
One of his first well know installations Untitled Slide Sequence (Workers leaving a Factory) (1972) featured a photographic sequence of workers leaving the Lockheed factory in California.
Sekula created the sequence by photographing employees from the Lockheed factory as they were walking upstairs away from the factory at the end of shift.
The 25 selected images were shown as the slide sequence of three sets. Projected and timed 13 second intervals totaling 17 minutes and 20 seconds looped. Sekula was inspired by experimental documentary photographer Walker Evans. A similarity of Evans photo series Labor Anonymous can be seen to the Untitled Slide Sequence. The presentation and rhythm of Slide Sequence takes on similar qualities to the Lumiere Bros film Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving a Factory). 1895. France. While Sekula’s timing of the slides allows the viewer a moment to contemplate the image but does not dwell for too long on that image, therefore creating fragments of different looking people emerging from the factory.
The timings of the sequence combined with subject matter introduce the viewer to visual elements that become the starting point for further exploration in Sekulas future work. Sekula also added text to the Untitled Title, (Workers leaving a Factory) which combined with the repetition of images and sound when slides are switched gives the viewer a sense of a factory and machines with in it as well as a definition of who the subjects in the photographs are.
The sequence ends with a picture of shoes and ground seemly moving away from the scene. Showing the viewer, the act of the documentation and the moment when it stopped. [1]
Following on from that series he turned the camera on one employee who was a chemical engineer and his family from the same factory, which happened to be Sekula’s own family. Using photographs, audio recordings, interviews, and personal documents Sekula created Aerospace Folk Tales. The installation was focused on family relationships, and what it meant to be middleclass in American and suddenly finding both parents unemployed. Further exploring the elements of film that had been used in Untitled Slide Sequence, and now pushing the limits of traditional documentary photography further. Sekula documented his parents (the couple) with a still camera and microphone. Sekula had originally envisioned Aerospace Folktales as a slide show as well, but ultimately decided to keep separate, image, text, and audio “tracks,” allowing their formal discontinuities to underscore the contradictions inherent in the documentary genre as well as in contemporary life both are their own kinds of folktales or mythologies. [2]
The original exhibition of Aerospace Folktales in 1973 featured 142 gelatin silver prints and eight title cards mounted to poster board; seven text panels mounted to poster board; four audiotape recordings, 75:24 minutes (loop)
Later he edited it down to 51 photographs and texts set in frames exhibited alongside three audio tracks, interviews with both parents and Sekula’s own commentary. Presented with three director’s chairs and potted plants. This combination of audiovisual materials and props in one installation became a method he was known for and as defined by Sekula as a disassembled movie.
My interest in Sekula’s work stems from his ethnological approach and consideration of the creation of a new work or archive. And how using materials such as documents, text, audio interviews and photographs (archival objects) could be used in this creation.
When Sekula died in 2013 he left behind a vast amount of materials from his work as photographer, theorist and teacher. From looking at Sekulas installations, photographs, films and writing one could also argue he was creating a well thought out archive for future generations to contemplate. Aerospace Folk Tales was the start of Sekula’s substantial output and is essentially the most personal as it revolves around his own family and shows the viewer where he has come from. And most importantly to me, forms the beginning of his practice-based research methodologies and considerations for future art making and writing. Sekula wrote many important books and papers relating to the art he created as well as photography. These writings are still discussed today and some critics even believe his writing to be more of legacy than his art. In terms of my understanding and first connection to Alan Sekulas practice I have chosen to critically look at one piece of writing as it relates to Aerospace Folktales and how Alan Sekula was considering the archive as material for the creation of AF. And in doing he also took on the role of creating a new archive of material from the art installation as a one unified piece.
In his 1986 research paper titled The Body and the Archive, Sekula gives the audience a detailed history of the origins of photography’s role in creating the archive as it relates to the creation of the criminal body. Through this reading Sekula explores the history of methodologies of archive creation and its intertwined roots in photography. Sekula argued that a portrait of a person can be honorific (conveying the dignity of that person) or repressive (recording the features of a criminal for instance) … “photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together.” The single hermeneutic paradigm in the 19th century – Two branches entwined – Physiognomy and phrenology – the belief that the face and head bore outward signs of inner character.
Sekula builds upon these concepts and demonstrates how these ideas have evolved over the years. Through understanding this history and possible outcomes , Sekula used his work as an honorific attempt as opposed to one that could create opportunity for repressive use. Methods of archival creation were arguable supposed to be scientific and have absolute truth, however much of the working methods explored were flawed as a result the outcome became oppressive and proven to be false.
Sekula explains this by writing about two men who had developed early methods of archival creation using photographs for classification and identification of criminals and classes of people. Alphonse Bertillon a Paris police official who invented a modern system of criminal identification by using 11 body measurements and photographs taken under all the same technical conditions, such as focal length, distance and light.
Francis Galton the statistician and founder of eugenics worked towards defining a criminal through physical traits. . Galton believed a photograph to be the absolute truth as it was compared to numbers which were originally known as the absolute truth. With that in mind he justified his composite images of criminal types. These images were made up of multiple negatives which actually removed details such as the ears from the picture. And in doing so took away a person’s individuality.
Throughout the Body and the Archive, Sekula makes references to text and its influence on the creation of photographs and the archive. As the photographic archive became more widely used beyond the realms of the police it became more known as the universal language.
“Photography was to be both an object and means of bibliographic rational¬ization. The latter possibility emerged from the development of microfilm re¬ production of documents. Just as photographs were to be incorporated into the realm of the text, so also the text could be incorporated into the realm of the photograph. If photography retained its prestige as a universal language, it in¬creasingly did so in conjunction with a textual paradigm that was housed within the library.”
Sekula concludes Body and Archive with the explanation of how Bertillion and Galtons ideas of the archive are still with us and should be recognized and especially considered when making art.
As he states, “For an artist or critic to resurrect the methods of bio¬ social typology without once acknowledging the historical context and consequences of these procedures is naive at best and cynical at worst. [3]
Sekula leaves the reader with an example of how a series of photographs could be misused as a tool of repression through the work of photographer Ernest Cole and his book House of Bondage. Cole set out to photograph a broad range of society with in South Africa in 1960-1976. In order to do so Cole changed his racial characteristic from Black to coloured. In doing so he was able to move more freely.
He was however was still constantly questioned when taking photos of actions around him, such as a white man slapping a black beggar child. While he was taking pictures of passport arrests he was asked to explain himself by the police. He claimed he was making a documentary on juvenile delinquency. The police then invited him to join the ranks of pervasive informers. Instead of joining he smuggled his negatives out of the country and published the book House of Bondage.
Sekula ends The Body and Archive with this final statement;
“If we are to listen to, and act in solidarity with, the polyphonic testimony of the oppressed and exploited, we should recognize that some of this testimony, like Cole’s, will take the ambiguous form of visual documents, documents of the “microphysics” of barbarism. These documents can easily fall into the hands of the police or their intellectual apologists. Our problem, as artists and intellectuals living near but not at the center of a global system of power, will be to help prevent the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official texts. “ [3]
In conclusion, through the research and publishing of The Body and Archive, Sekula has in essence justified many of his initial ideas of art making which were first explored in Aerospace Folk Tales. Concern with representation, ambiguity of materials, and repression were some of problems with the original creation of photographic archives.
Sekula had taken these concerns with in creating Aerospace Folk tales and offerd opportunities for the subjects to speak through audio and the photographs to be considered in sequences combined with text cards. As opposed to being left as single ambiguous pictures on a wall. These elements combined with Sekula placing himself with in the work demonstrate how he envisioned an art project based in archival methods would hopefully be seen as informative in a non-repressive way, and in fact fought against the notion of photography and the archive being repressive. And instead looked for the honorific path of how subjects with in Aerospace Folktales were seen.
[1] Mendes, A., Mouzinho, S., Tejo, C., Góis, J., Rua), T., Felix, M., Belo, M., Costa, V., Palma, M., Gaido, E., Sousa, E., Felix, M., Cecílio, B., Gomes, A., Kohl, P., Santa, J. and Gaido, E. (2018). The critical realism of Allan Sekula: challenging orders through artistic activism. Early works: (1972-1984) | Wrong Wrong Magazine. [online] Wrong Wrong Magazine. Available at: https://wrongwrong.net/article/the-critical-realism-of-allan-sekula-challenging-orders-through-artistic-activism-early-works-1972-1984 [Accessed 20 Nov. 2019].
[2] Sawyer, D. (2017). Aerospace Folktales From Allan Sekula, dreams and illusions of the postwar American economy. Aperture, [online] (226). Available at: https://aperture.org/blog/aerospace-folktales-sekula/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2019].
[3] Sekula, A. (1986). The Body and the Archive. [Essay] SAIC Flaxman Library, Chicago.
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Alan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, theorist, film maker and critic. Active from the early 1970’s till his death in 2013. Over his professional life time themes he focused on included: family life, work and unemployment to schooling and the military complex, and globalization.
One of his first well know installations Untitled Slide Sequence (Workers leaving a Factory) (1972) featured a photographic sequence of workers leaving the Lockheed factory in California.
Sekula created the sequence by photographing employees from the Lockheed factory as they were walking upstairs away from the factory at the end of shift.
The 25 selected images were shown as the slide sequence of three sets. Projected and timed 13 second intervals totaling 17 minutes and 20 seconds looped. Sekula was inspired by experimental documentary photographer Walker Evans. A similarity of Evans photo series Labor Anonymous can be seen to the Untitled Slide Sequence. The presentation and rhythm of Slide Sequence takes on similar qualities to the Lumiere Bros film Sortie d’usine (Workers Leaving a Factory). 1895. France. While Sekula’s timing of the slides allows the viewer a moment to contemplate the image but does not dwell for too long on that image, therefore creating fragments of different looking people emerging from the factory.
The timings of the sequence combined with subject matter introduce the viewer to visual elements that become the starting point for further exploration in Sekulas future work. Sekula also added text to the Untitled Title, (Workers leaving a Factory) which combined with the repetition of images and sound when slides are switched gives the viewer a sense of a factory and machines with in it as well as a definition of who the subjects in the photographs are.
The sequence ends with a picture of shoes and ground seemly moving away from the scene. Showing the viewer, the act of the documentation and the moment when it stopped. [1]
Following on from that series he turned the camera on one employee who was a chemical engineer and his family from the same factory, which happened to be Sekula’s own family. Using photographs, audio recordings, interviews, and personal documents Sekula created Aerospace Folk Tales. The installation was focused on family relationships, and what it meant to be middleclass in American and suddenly finding both parents unemployed. Further exploring the elements of film that had been used in Untitled Slide Sequence, and now pushing the limits of traditional documentary photography further. Sekula documented his parents (the couple) with a still camera and microphone. Sekula had originally envisioned Aerospace Folktales as a slide show as well, but ultimately decided to keep separate, image, text, and audio “tracks,” allowing their formal discontinuities to underscore the contradictions inherent in the documentary genre as well as in contemporary life both are their own kinds of folktales or mythologies. [2]
The original exhibition of Aerospace Folktales in 1973 featured 142 gelatin silver prints and eight title cards mounted to poster board; seven text panels mounted to poster board; four audiotape recordings, 75:24 minutes (loop)
Later he edited it down to 51 photographs and texts set in frames exhibited alongside three audio tracks, interviews with both parents and Sekula’s own commentary. Presented with three director’s chairs and potted plants. This combination of audiovisual materials and props in one installation became a method he was known for and as defined by Sekula as a disassembled movie.
My interest in Sekula’s work stems from his ethnological approach and consideration of the creation of a new work or archive. And how using materials such as documents, text, audio interviews and photographs (archival objects) could be used in this creation.
When Sekula died in 2013 he left behind a vast amount of materials from his work as photographer, theorist and teacher. From looking at Sekulas installations, photographs, films and writing one could also argue he was creating a well thought out archive for future generations to contemplate. Aerospace Folk Tales was the start of Sekula’s substantial output and is essentially the most personal as it revolves around his own family and shows the viewer where he has come from. And most importantly to me, forms the beginning of his practice-based research methodologies and considerations for future art making and writing. Sekula wrote many important books and papers relating to the art he created as well as photography. These writings are still discussed today and some critics even believe his writing to be more of legacy than his art. In terms of my understanding and first connection to Alan Sekulas practice I have chosen to critically look at one piece of writing as it relates to Aerospace Folktales and how Alan Sekula was considering the archive as material for the creation of AF. And in doing he also took on the role of creating a new archive of material from the art installation as a one unified piece.
In his 1986 research paper titled The Body and the Archive, Sekula gives the audience a detailed history of the origins of photography’s role in creating the archive as it relates to the creation of the criminal body. Through this reading Sekula explores the history of methodologies of archive creation and its intertwined roots in photography. Sekula argued that a portrait of a person can be honorific (conveying the dignity of that person) or repressive (recording the features of a criminal for instance) … “photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together.” The single hermeneutic paradigm in the 19th century – Two branches entwined – Physiognomy and phrenology – the belief that the face and head bore outward signs of inner character.
Sekula builds upon these concepts and demonstrates how these ideas have evolved over the years. Through understanding this history and possible outcomes , Sekula used his work as an honorific attempt as opposed to one that could create opportunity for repressive use. Methods of archival creation were arguable supposed to be scientific and have absolute truth, however much of the working methods explored were flawed as a result the outcome became oppressive and proven to be false.
Sekula explains this by writing about two men who had developed early methods of archival creation using photographs for classification and identification of criminals and classes of people. Alphonse Bertillon a Paris police official who invented a modern system of criminal identification by using 11 body measurements and photographs taken under all the same technical conditions, such as focal length, distance and light.
Francis Galton the statistician and founder of eugenics worked towards defining a criminal through physical traits. . Galton believed a photograph to be the absolute truth as it was compared to numbers which were originally known as the absolute truth. With that in mind he justified his composite images of criminal types. These images were made up of multiple negatives which actually removed details such as the ears from the picture. And in doing so took away a person’s individuality.
Throughout the Body and the Archive, Sekula makes references to text and its influence on the creation of photographs and the archive. As the photographic archive became more widely used beyond the realms of the police it became more known as the universal language.
“Photography was to be both an object and means of bibliographic rational¬ization. The latter possibility emerged from the development of microfilm re¬ production of documents. Just as photographs were to be incorporated into the realm of the text, so also the text could be incorporated into the realm of the photograph. If photography retained its prestige as a universal language, it in¬creasingly did so in conjunction with a textual paradigm that was housed within the library.”
Sekula concludes Body and Archive with the explanation of how Bertillion and Galtons ideas of the archive are still with us and should be recognized and especially considered when making art.
As he states, “For an artist or critic to resurrect the methods of bio¬ social typology without once acknowledging the historical context and consequences of these procedures is naive at best and cynical at worst. [3]
Sekula leaves the reader with an example of how a series of photographs could be misused as a tool of repression through the work of photographer Ernest Cole and his book House of Bondage. Cole set out to photograph a broad range of society with in South Africa in 1960-1976. In order to do so Cole changed his racial characteristic from Black to coloured. In doing so he was able to move more freely.
He was however was still constantly questioned when taking photos of actions around him, such as a white man slapping a black beggar child. While he was taking pictures of passport arrests he was asked to explain himself by the police. He claimed he was making a documentary on juvenile delinquency. The police then invited him to join the ranks of pervasive informers. Instead of joining he smuggled his negatives out of the country and published the book House of Bondage.
Sekula ends The Body and Archive with this final statement;
“If we are to listen to, and act in solidarity with, the polyphonic testimony of the oppressed and exploited, we should recognize that some of this testimony, like Cole’s, will take the ambiguous form of visual documents, documents of the “microphysics” of barbarism. These documents can easily fall into the hands of the police or their intellectual apologists. Our problem, as artists and intellectuals living near but not at the center of a global system of power, will be to help prevent the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official texts. “ [3]
In conclusion, through the research and publishing of The Body and Archive, Sekula has in essence justified many of his initial ideas of art making which were first explored in Aerospace Folk Tales. Concern with representation, ambiguity of materials, and repression were some of problems with the original creation of photographic archives.
Sekula had taken these concerns with in creating Aerospace Folk tales and offerd opportunities for the subjects to speak through audio and the photographs to be considered in sequences combined with text cards. As opposed to being left as single ambiguous pictures on a wall. These elements combined with Sekula placing himself with in the work demonstrate how he envisioned an art project based in archival methods would hopefully be seen as informative in a non-repressive way, and in fact fought against the notion of photography and the archive being repressive. And instead looked for the honorific path of how subjects with in Aerospace Folktales were seen.
[1] Mendes, A., Mouzinho, S., Tejo, C., Góis, J., Rua), T., Felix, M., Belo, M., Costa, V., Palma, M., Gaido, E., Sousa, E., Felix, M., Cecílio, B., Gomes, A., Kohl, P., Santa, J. and Gaido, E. (2018). The critical realism of Allan Sekula: challenging orders through artistic activism. Early works: (1972-1984) | Wrong Wrong Magazine. [online] Wrong Wrong Magazine. Available at: https://wrongwrong.net/article/the-critical-realism-of-allan-sekula-challenging-orders-through-artistic-activism-early-works-1972-1984 [Accessed 20 Nov. 2019].
[2] Sawyer, D. (2017). Aerospace Folktales From Allan Sekula, dreams and illusions of the postwar American economy. Aperture, [online] (226). Available at: https://aperture.org/blog/aerospace-folktales-sekula/ [Accessed 20 Nov. 2019].
[3] Sekula, A. (1986). The Body and the Archive. [Essay] SAIC Flaxman Library, Chicago.
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