Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]
I see my own critical project now as an attempt to understand the social character of “the traffic in photographs.” Taken literally, this traffic involves the social production, circulation and reception of photographs in a society based on commodity production and exchange. Taken metaphorically, the notion of traffic suggests the peculiar way in which photographic meaning—and the very discourse of photography— is characterized by what Lukács termed the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.” This is always a movement between objectivism and subjectivism.
The dominant spectacle, with its seductive commodities and authoritative visual “facts,” could not exist without photographs or photographers…. We forget that most photographers are detail workers, makers of fragmentary and indeterminate visual statements.
Just as money is the universal gauge of exchange value, uniting all the goods in a single system of transactions, so photographs are imagined to reduce all sights to relations of formal equivalence. Here, I think, lies one major aspect of the origins of the pervasive formalism that haunts the visual arts of the bourgeois epoch. Formalism collects all the world’s images in a single esthetic emporium, torn from all the contingencies of origin, meaning and use.
[A] particularly obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore—the claim for the intrinsic significance of the photograph—lies at the center of the established myth of photographic truth. Put simply, the photograph is seen as a re-presentation of nature itself, as an unmediated copy of the real world. The medium itself is considered transparent.
Every work of photographic art has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the archives of the police.
A clear boundary has been drawn between photography and its social character. In other words, the ills of photography are the ills of estheticism. Estheticism must be superceded, in its entirety, for a meaningful art, of any sort, to emerge.
