Allan Sekula:

Photographic Work
Andrew Witt

The photographic career of Allan Sekula ended on 10 August 2013,

after the artist’s two-year battle with cancer. He left behind a studio full of pho-
tographs, now preserved in the collection of the Allan Sekula papers in the Getty
Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, alongside the artist’s notebooks, journals,
correspondence, teaching notes, newspaper clippings, and photocopied texts. These
papers and images document the incomplete and fragmentary life of Sekula’s studio,
as they include the photographs made throughout his life that were kept but never
incorporated into a completed sequence or finished work. As objects of the studio, the
artist’s intention for much of this visual material is difficult to know.
At first glance, the collection of images, papers, and notebooks in the GRI’s collec-
tion is bewildering. Sekula’s archive spans the full spectrum of photographic work:
snapshots, test images, trials, unprinted photographs, abandoned works, and unre-
alized images.1 Many of the images, we can assume, were captured intermittently,
on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. In these folders, one finds images of the artist’s
common themes: docks, shipyards, and inner-city rebellions, as well as more inti-
mate images: photographs of family, friends, collaborators, strangers, fellow travelers,
pedestrians in Los Angeles, unhoused men and women of the city, and, not to forget,
the police. In the archive, personal and sentimental images are placed alongside photo-
graphs from his better-known projects, Aerospace Folktales (1973), This Ain’t China: A Pho-
tonovel (1974), and Fish Story (1995). The unprinted photographs found in Sekula’s archive
not only detail the artist’s assiduous and lifelong interrogation of the contemporary
conditions of globalized labor but also allow for a sustained reflection on the unexplored
threads at the heart of the artist’s rethinking of the nature of photographic work.
Many of Sekula’s photographs, for instance, divulge undeveloped forays into a
project or concept. A large collection of color positive film held in the GRI was shot
in San Pedro, where the artist spent much of his boyhood, although he never fully
returned to a project there. Sekula rarely went out without a camera, and he usually
made pictures on any given day in Los Angeles, even between major projects.2 The
black-and-white negatives found in the archive were almost always printed in contact

Getty Research Journal, no. 14 (2021): 151 – 79 © 2021 Andrew Witt

151
sheets, to be studied up close, magnified with a loupe, whereas Sekula’s color photo-
graphs were shot in positive slide film, which enabled him to study the images with a
loupe as soon as the film was processed. According to his widow, photographic histo-
rian Sally Stein, he would often come home from the lab dissatisfied with his results.3
Sekula’s photographic practice from the mid-1970s onward was a project under-
stood through what he called in one of his early notebooks the “disassembled movie.”4
He articulated a method of working photographically, alongside text and audio
components, the whole conceived as a distinctive mode of editing and sequencing.
Cinematographic methods—mini-sequences, focusing, detail work, panning, cross-
cutting—were subject to assembly, montage, and construction as well as disassembly,
ruination, and wreckage. On a material level, the association of photography with film
made perfect sense. Sekula’s early photographic rolls housed at the GRI are displayed
as a continuous span of negative film (much like a negative of a movie) that would be
cut only when the film is to fit in the plastic sheeting. This is true for a number of pho-
tographic rolls of Sekula’s early works, such as Aerospace Folktales and This Ain’t China:
A Photonovel.
The photographs held in the Sekula archive are not single fine-art prints—a type
of which the artist himself could be an acerbic critic—but they do not always fit within
a predetermined photographic sequence, a form Sekula preferred.5 The chronological
organization of the archive in the GRI calls attention to the artist’s unexpected jumps
in subject and style. Rather than dividing his photographs into “good” or “bad” images,
the archive encourages us to consider something more fundamental: the social, politi-
cal, and unconscious impulses that drive the creation of photographic images.6
These studio images can almost be thought of as pieces of the artist’s everyday
note-taking over the duration of his career. His notebooks contain dregs of the day:
dreams, conversations, quotes, overheard dialogue, doodles, sketches, names, and
phone numbers. In one of the first comprehensive studies of Sekula’s notebooks, Stein
asserted that they formed a compelling trove for historical research in that they “figure
as sites of fledgling drafts for projects that may take years to be realized fully or par-
tially.”7 Instead of being peripheral to the finished project, these unfinished works and
notes encourage us to view Sekula’s work at an angle, forcing us to rewrite the history
of photography in a different way. It is possible to map the links between these notes
and unprinted photographs with Sekula’s finished work. The danger in this approach,
however, is the tendency to conform each image to be a study toward the ultimate
works as he presented them, at the expense of examining the unique possibilities for
reading the photographic sequence as an open and indeterminate form.
The method of photographic work, founded on openness, uncertainty, and the
revision of the fragmentary, is clearly on display in two works the artist completed
near the end of his life: Edit Nine (2008) and California Stories (1973–75, printed in
2011, 2012). Edit Nine comprised a series of billboard-size photographs installed on
the grounds of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San
Marino, California, at the exhibition This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los

152 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 Angeles Photographs (14 June–16 September 2008). It was envisioned as a “prose poem
in pictures,” a meditation on the last two decades of the artist’s life in Los Angeles. In
fact, the title of the work referred to the number of edits required to select the final
photographs and how to arrange them. California Stories (Christopher Grimes Gallery,
5 November 2011–7 January 2012) was staged as an exhibition of seven unprinted works
that the artist had originally shot in the mid-1970s but never exhibited publicly. Sekula
had practiced this kind of retrospective glance and gesture—for which he went back
to his archive and considered abandoned projects, works, and individual images—
since the early 1970s. Edit Nine and California Stories reveal how much his work in Los
Angeles was premised on striking a balance between the unprinted fragment and the
finished sequence.
This essay considers the forking paths and broken links in the world of images as
a way to rethink standard narratives of modern photographic history in Los Angeles.
It focuses on these revised works and sketches from the Allan Sekula papers as a col-
lection of images and thoughts that command our attention in their own right. Their
importance puts new attention on accounts of Sekula’s activity and intentions as well
as on our own encounters with the photographic archive as a way of understanding
the dynamic interplay of history and labor in Los Angeles. Sekula’s process of con-
tinuously editing and reworking components into a finished sequence was a way of
actively engaging with the city—its dominant modes of representation, its contradic-
tions, its violence, its repressions. My focus on Sekula’s relation to California broadly
and Los Angeles specifically is founded on the obstacles that a city like Los Angeles
poses for documentary work.8
Sekula, a writer, teacher, and practitioner, had a working life in photography that
was anything but fixed. I am reminded of a handwritten note he had penned for a talk
he gave at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam on 3 December 1990, in which he described
his own practice as attempting to reinvent the role of the photoreporter as that of a
“sly, extra-institutional trickster.”9 Heterogeneous, polyvocal, and often provisional,
the photographs assembled in Sekula’s archive suggest a mode of photographic work
intent on constantly disrupting the conventions and codes of the medium. The artist’s
focus on the afterlives of his own works attends to the ways his images may suddenly
be animated, activated, and awakened from a latent state into something more tan-
gible, affective, and material. His own interaction with revised projects and notes
encourages us to define more latent possibilities of something otherwise only known
to the historian through fragmentary documents and archives.
———
When Sekula prepared seven unrealized works for the exhibition California Stories
in 2011, he constructed the project as an explicit response to the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art’s restaging of the 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a
Man-Altered Landscape from 25 October 2009 to 3 January 2010. In the Christopher
Grimes Gallery’s press release, the artist remarked how he had positioned his photo-
graphic practice in the mid-1970s, aesthetically and politically, against the work of the

Witt / Allan Sekula 153

New Topographics, a loose collection of artists that he had admired but also described,
half-jokingly, as “the neutron bomb school of photography” who practiced a type of
work that, as he put it, “killed people but left real-estate standing.”10
Curated by William Jenkins, the original New Topographics exhibition had been
installed at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in
Rochester, New York (14 October 1975–2 February 1976) and included work by the Amer-
ican artists Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John
Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr., alongside works by the German couple
Bernd and Hilla Becher. Although the artists represented in New Topographics did not
form a coherent group or school, they were stylistically united through a distinctive
set of formalist values, exhibited primarily in their adherence to the full-frame photo-
graphic print, sharp focus, minimal grain, and wide tonal range.11 Despite the fact that
Sekula admired the work of Baltz and others for their desire to address and picture
the new prefabricated, mass-produced, commercial landscapes of suburban America,
he insisted that the work fell short in its attempt to convey how these same social
and commercial relations could be rendered photographically. Their attempt to show
how the landscape was dramatically altered by human activity, he thought, obscured
rather than illuminated any social wrongs or injustices.
In contrast, Sekula’s work from the early 1970s onward sought to address how the
topography of California could be reimagined photographically.12 “What I was experi-
menting with as an alternative,” he wrote, “was a way of suggesting that social topog-
raphy was inevitably the site of social strife, class war, land-grabs, ethnic-cleansing,
race-war, repression, and empire.” The artist insisted that this was especially true
in California, “where the bones of the first inhabitants crunch underfoot with every
step.”13 Sekula’s list forces the question: How can the medium of photography render
this dynamic array of forces visible? The list seems almost inexhaustible; the task,
equally as impossible. What one quickly realizes when looking at the photographs pre-
sented in California Stories is how the project relied on the unpublished photographs,
experiments, and once-jettisoned studio marginalia that were reanimated over thirty
years later to address the demands of the present.
California Stories included six works: Red Squad (San Diego, 20 January 1973)
(1973/2012), Guns and Butter (1975/2012), Attempt to Correlate Social Class with Elevation
above Main Harbor Channel, San Pedro, July 1975 (1975/2011), Vietnamese Village (1975/2011),
Cliffhanger (1975/2011), and Surf Movie (1973/2012). For the 2011 exhibition, two works,
provisionally titled Accident Prone, Sacramento, August 1977 (1977/2011) and Chinese Opera
(1973/2011), were prepared and even published in the gallery press release, but the art-
ist pulled them before the installation and opening.14
Accident Prone, Sacramento, August 1977 presents a grid of twelve photographs of a
collection of work-related accidents (fig. 1). Upon first reading, the work’s title reads
as a joke, since none of the photographs appears as a real accident. When arranged
as a grid and in sequence, they show three bodies—the artist’s brother Stefan (a

154 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 FIG. 1. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Accident Prone, Sacramento, August 1977, 1977/2011,
unprinted mock-up. © Allan Sekula Studio.

cabinetmaker), his sister Michelle (a commercial model), and his own hand—as if
possessed by some ludic force.
What are these so-called accidents pictured in the grid? In the top left of the
sequence, a drill bit is cranked downward, pressing toward a man’s temple. Then a dog
is held up as a sacrifice to an industrial saw. Then a kneecap is threatened with a small
hammer and clamp. In another image, jumper cables are placed on a man’s beard.
Below this row, a woman is shielded by a black industrial tarp. Next to this image, an
industrial fan appears to suck up the man’s head, then appears to swallow his arm. A
mechanical clamp crushes down on the photographer’s hand. Shards of fiberglass are
consumed as a poisonous substance. And finally, an arm is measured against a circular
saw blade as if it were a two-by-four. Each “accident” marks a humorous encounter
between Sekula’s clownish protagonist and a destructive mechanical apparatus.
Taking place in what looks like a community college workshop, each body appears
to lurch and teeter, stagger and stumble toward an exaggerated instance of self-
destruction. In a way, the bodies featured in Accident Prone exhibit a contradictory
materiality: viewed through one lens, they appear possessed by a self-destructive
force, and yet, viewed through another, they appear obstinately indestructible. As
the sequence builds frame by frame, the same body returns over and over again, and
another accident is added to the sequence. The characters appear stubbornly inhuman
in their tireless capacity to withstand repeated accidents and continue onward to the
next calamity.15
This figure mimics the gestures and movements of the Fordist assembly line but
pushes them to a comic and exaggerated extreme. The humor in Accident Prone is not
simply the potential for destructive violence per se—for instance, a drill bit spinning

Witt / Allan Sekula 155

toward a man’s temple—but rather the fact that this same body is threatened, again
and again, in what seems like an unending loop.
Sekula’s early projects—initiated while a student at the University of Califor-
nia, San Diego (UCSD), alongside his friends and comrades Martha Rosler and Fred
Lonidier—were shot with hand-held 35mm cameras, often borrowed from friends.
When California Stories is considered in relation to the work of Sekula’s colleagues at
UCSD, one can see compelling connections between Accident Prone and their work.16
Lonidier’s photographs of occupational health and safety “accidents” taken in the late
1970s for The Health and Safety Game: Fictions Based on Fact (1976) display distinct simi-
larities to Accident Prone. One could speculate, perhaps, that Accident Prone was staged
as a subtle reworking of Lonidier’s project.17 Through pantomime and mimesis, Sekula
appears to reference Charlie Chaplin’s physical comedy in his “negative expression,” to
recall Walter Benjamin’s words, a form of expression that transforms a distinct form
of bodily humor into a stringent mode of class critique.
While the exhibition California Stories stands apart from Sekula’s better-known
works from the 1970s such as Untitled Slide Sequence (1972) and Aerospace Folktales, it
is also related to them in important ways: even as California Stories gestures toward
the more expansive photo works began at UCSD, it also reworks a number of formal
elements from his shorter, more experimental works such as Meat Mass (1972) and
Box Car (1971).18 As the artist would later recall in an interview, these photographs
exploited the rough, tonal print quality associated with performance documenta-
tion such as that found in the art magazine Avalanche (1970–76), and it also associated
the photo-performances of Sekula’s undergraduate professor John Baldessari and the
photobooks of Ed Ruscha.19 “I was drawn to a very mundane idea of documentary,”
Sekula stated in an interview in 1998, “something very direct, uninflected by obvious
aesthetic treatment.”20
In another sequence from California Stories, Attempt to Correlate Social Class with
Elevation above Main Harbor Channel, San Pedro, July 1975, the artist’s body and gestures
are figured as a pivotal measurement of value (fig. 2). The six images compare three
homes, hierarchically ordered, from top to bottom. In three separate frames, Sekula’s
hand mimics the placement of the harbor channel in relation to upper-, middle-, and
lower-class homes. Class hierarchy is spatialized and made measurable to a body. The
landscape is approached through a comic perspective. With no other unit of measure
at hand, Sekula’s body and camera stand in to assess and measure the reified social
order as a type of mimetic exacerbation. In each instance, the photographer’s body
serves as the primary, if not relative, unit of measurement—a means to mock the pre-
tenses of real estate and class hierarchy.21 Although performative and theatrical in its
mode, the work is very different from the gravity and rectitude exhibited in Accident
Prone, and closer to the stance adopted in Martha Rosler’s video works Semiotics of the
Kitchen (1975) and Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977).
Sekula’s Attempt to Correlate Social Class advances a physiognomic mode of think-
ing. The project develops from an early nineteenth-century physiognomic concept,

156 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 FIG. 2. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Attempt to Correlate Social Class with Elevation above
Main Harbor Channel, San Pedro, July 1975, 1975/2011. Six archival pigment prints in a passe-partout,
101.6 × 101.6 cm (framed). © Allan Sekula Studio.

whereby the body of the artist is capable of revealing aspects of the socioeconomic
totality.22 The concept presumes the reader’s ability to intuit a more expansive political
notion of the individual from the portrait. In the sequence, the artist is rendered blind
when he reaches the home of the petite bourgeoisie and mute when confronted with a
working-class home. There is a striking parallel to another work by Sekula from 1972,
Self Portrait as Sculptor / Painter / Photographer (figs. 3a–c), which oscillates between
serious self-posing and comic imagery: the sculptor as a steely and monumental figure,
the painter as a blind expressionist, and the photographer as a deadpan and objective
realist. In his portrait of the painter, Sekula has fastened a pair of welding goggles

Witt / Allan Sekula 157

FIGS. 3a–c. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Self Portrait as Sculptor / Painter / Pho-
tographer, 1972. Three black-and-white photographs, each 20.3 × 25.4 cm. © Allan Sekula
Studio.

158 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 over his eyes and has covered over the lenses with thick slabs of paint. The framing of
the photograph recalls Gustave Courbet’s The Desperate Man (1842), but in this case his
iteration is slapstick and more eccentric. His hands are covered in cumbersome work
gloves, and his right hand grasps a plastic razor.
If there is an afterlife of physiognomic thought at work in Sculptor / Painter / Pho-
tographer and Attempt to Correlate Social Class, it is one that foregrounds the incon-
gruous measure between the body and social order. This operation is also evidenced
in other works by the artist and his colleagues at UCSD, such as Sekula’s Untitled
Slide Sequence, Lonidier’s 29 Arrests (1972), or Rosler’s Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply
Obtained. Although Sekula’s main theoretical texts written at this time are instrumen-
tal in mapping the new terrain of documentary work in the 1970s, these same texts do
little to unpack how his own work produced at the same moment operates in the inter-
stices between comedy and political economy. The comic in his portrait practice could
be read, perhaps, as an aesthetic strategy linked to a neo-materialist physiognomy, a
means through which the body of the artist and its mobilization within the conven-
tions of portraiture are deployed to demonstrate how social relations, comically, relate
to political economy.23
Before Sekula tested the limits of the comedic and the performative in Accident
Prone, he worked through this dialectical relation in a short performance that he titled
Meat Mass (an early iteration of the title was Meat Mass: Interrupting the Capitalist Circu-
lation of Luxury Goods through Robbery and Waste). For the work, the artist stole expen-
sive cuts of steak from a local supermarket, then carried them in his jacket pocket
to the local freeway, where he proceeded to dodge between passing cars and throw
the stolen goods under the wheels of oncoming cars and trucks.24 The resulting pho-
tographs detail a deadpan and comic transformation of a simple grocery commodity
into a pulverized carcass (figs. 4a–c). Negatives held in the GRI’s collection detail the
drama of the act.
In the sequence, the theft is figured obliquely: there are shots before and after
the deed that track the stacks of meat on the supermarket shelves, and of Sekula
exiting the Safeway supermarket, presumably with the meat in his jacket pocket.
The theft was envisioned as an act of interruption of the capitalist economy, as the
title suggests, but it also played off of the meat advertisements posted on the super-
market shelves. A number of photographs held in the GRI but never shown when
the work was on display focus on a number of ads that read “Free Meat.” Although
we are never shown the artist being caught in the act, Sekula appears in the photo-
graph with his head down, framed by the glass door of the supermarket—as if he too
were on display—striking a congruence between the body of the photographer and
the hunk of meat sequestered away in his jacket. Then we see Sekula’s getaway car,
lengthwise and at an angle, so the Safeway sign itself is on display. The next nine pho-
tographs present Sekula standing on the side of the highway, seen from an overpass.
Immediately in front of him, a big-rig truck is about to rumble past. After this image,
the sequence cuts to a shot of the freeway and a close-up of Sekula holding a slab of

Witt / Allan Sekula 159

FIGS. 4a–c. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Images from the performance Meat Mass, 1972.
Three of twelve black-and-white photographs and text, each 15.2 × 23.3 cm. Photographs by Allan
Sekula and David Alward. © Allan Sekula Studio.

160 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 FIGS. 5a–c. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Images from the performance
Meat Mass, 1972. Three of twelve black-and-white photographs and text, each 15.2
× 23.3 cm. Photographs by Allan Sekula and David Alward. © Allan Sekula Studio.

Witt / Allan Sekula 161

meat in his hand as if it were his heart. At this time, the state had finished extend-
ing California’s major interstate, I-5, south to San Diego. The new highway permitted
faster speeds with all of the accompanying risks. There is a sense that the artist was
performing a ritual fatality.
The following six photographs allow the action to unfold: the artist framed from
the overpass, scampering to and fro in the middle of the freeway, confronting traffic
head on, aiming and tossing the slabs of meat in the paths of cars. The fifth photograph
shows the artist, now crouching close to the pavement, grimacing, and the next image
presents the meat transformed into a white, fatty stain (figs. 5a–c). The last photograph
pictures him again from the perspective of the freeway, climbing up the embankment,
fleeing the scene. The freeway is not represented positively, through sentiments of the
American road trip, but negatively, with the look of roadkill.25 While the New Topo-
graphics artists were utterly unsentimental, Robert Frank’s photobook The Americans,
documenting his 1956 road trip, is full of sentiment but also features images of highway
deaths marked by corpses.
The term luxury goods in an early title of Meat Mass might seem like a stretch, but
as historian Rick Perlstein has noted, meat shortages and prices gave it a luxury sta-
tus in the early 1970s. In 1972, in the midst of economic recession and rising inflation,
the price of meat was subject to a national boycott over the doubling of meat prices.26
At the height of the boycott, eighteen thousand leaflets were distributed across the
country, and in San Francisco, demonstrators organized mass mail-outs of slabs of
bologna to President Richard Nixon and Governor Ronald Reagan. It was reported
that housewives in New York marched behind a cow marked with the words, “We
Want Meat Not Promises.” And in Cleveland, a judge was said to have set bond at
three thousand dollars for a man who was accused of stealing seventy pounds of
sirloin from a restaurant. The judge had argued that the piece of meat was more
precious than jewels. The judge’s sentencing aligns, suggestively, with Sekula’s own
title for the performance. During moments of crisis, the most precious and the most
abject become indistinct.
———
On this dialectical play between text and image, comedy and confrontation, I want
to return to another work of Sekula’s from the series California Stories that explicitly
addresses the intersections of race, class, and social conflict on the topography of
Southern California: his Cliffhanger (fig. 6).
This assemblage of text and image tells the story of a chase between members of
the San Pedro police department and a Black youth in 1974. Cliffhanger was one of many
works by Sekula and his colleagues at UCSD where photographs were “bracketed by
text” as a means to anchor and complicate the sequence of photographs.27 Sekula inno-
vatively employed a range of literary genres, such as the folktale, the novella, and the
essay, in his works Aerospace Folktales and This Ain’t China: A Photonovel. In Cliffhanger,
the narrative begins mid-action with a description of a California seascape and an
evocation of a sea disaster, and quickly moves to the main action: a Black teenager

162 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 hiding out from police, on a cliff’s edge. The narrative resembles the direct and punchy
language of Los Angeles noir associated with the hardboiled crime novels of Raymond
Chandler and Ross Macdonald:

[. . .]

A voice from below the edge of the cliff

Psst. . . . you see any cops?

A black kid, maybe 16, shirtless, peers out from behind a precariously rooted sage-
brush, his bare feet kicking loose shale down the slope, his hands grasping a rust-
ing bit of pipe sticking out of the dirt.

Head swivel and half turn east, toward Gaffey, past the old coast artillery bun-
ker and the fake Vietnamese Village used for “search and destroy” practice. And
then back ahead west, toward the missile base at White Point. Nothing and again
nothing.

—Nope

see an old car, painted grey?

FIG. 6. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Cliffhanger, 1975/2011. Six archival pigment prints and
text in a passe-partout, 91.4 × 183.2 cm (framed). © Allan Sekula Studio.

Witt / Allan Sekula 163

 Another swivel to the east, and sure enough, a late-50s Chevy Impala rumbles into
view, blue smoke belching, fan belt screeching, laden down with passengers. An
older black man leans out from behind the wheel, scanning the token barrier at
the edge of the cliff.

—these might be your friends

The kid pulls himself up, bolts across the road for the car, which is screeching
through a wide and dusty u-turn, jumps in, and off they go.

Two minutes later, the cops pull up.

Have you seen a negro youth, no shirt?

—Nope, sorry. . . .

Cliffhanger’s short narrative is accompanied by a sequence of six photographs. In

the work’s layout, Sekula’s camera mimics the narrator’s text, first pivoting along the
highway to command the perspective of the lookout, then three photographs show the
highway viewed from the cliff’s edge, then his camera pivots along the highway. Peer-
ing out onto the mock Vietnamese village on the south side of the highway, he pho-
tographs a car on the east, a scampering dog immediately ahead in the middle of the
highway, and the empty highway on the far right. The next images arranged below the
previous three show the lookout point on the highway: first, the white Ford, then the
artist himself, kneeling at the cliff’s edge (in a position similar to Ed Ruscha’s postur-
ing as a detective in Royal Road Test of 1967). The final image from the sequence shows
a woman (presumably Martha Rosler) reading what looks like a book on art history.
In the photographer’s own self-portrait on the side of the cliff, the artist becomes the
narrator, pointing to the side of the slope where the youth was hidden. Sekula deploys
methods of reportage and documentary photojournalism in his use of grainy textures,
available light, and fleeting scenes, while ultimately distancing his project from the
tone, tenor, and circulation of photojournalism.28
The work’s short narrative sequence mimics what art historian Thomas Crow has
called the “seriocomic” hardboiled style of Los Angeles noir.29 Sekula slyly mimics
the literary voice of noir but displaces it ever so slightly as a way to address the asym-
metrical political and racial encounters of Southern California. Sekula’s title reads as
a knowing pun: a Black teenager is literally hanging off a cliff evading police detection.
What is notable about Sekula’s role in the sequence is that the artist does not collabo-
rate with the police but rather aids in the youth’s escape.30
Norman M. Klein, a cultural critic who was a colleague of Sekula’s at CalArts in
the 1990s, has argued that the genre of noir in Los Angeles emerged in part as a type
of mythos about white panic during the Depression.31 Although noir described the

164 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 underside of American life, for Klein it also presented an “ideologically false” vision of
the city’s poor and, in particular, the nonwhite people of Los Angeles.32 All too often,
Klein claimed, the genre stands in for fears about foreigners, jobs, speculation, and
cheap hype.
In contrast, Sekula disrupts this form of prejudice and presents a different vision
of class and race. Cliffhanger is much closer to the noir fiction of Chester Himes—an
author the artist read—as it is a narration told from below, from the racial margins.
While in Cliffhanger neither the fleeing Black youth nor the police figure directly, they
do in Red Squad (San Diego, 20 January 1973) (1973/2012). Moreover, the city is pictured
in an unforgiving midday light on the coast rather than at night, as is common in Los
Angeles noir. Although the artist is positioned as an accidental detective, photographi-
cally restating the narrative movements, he does not aid the police investigation—the
Black youth has escaped in a getaway car.
In one of the first comprehensive studies of the artist’s notebooks, Sally Stein
observed that a note from 1975, provisionally titled “San Pedro Notes: A Geography”
(fig. 7), details an early example of “social mapping,” which in the 1980s the artist
would reprise in works such as Sketch for a Geography Lesson (1983), Canadian Notes
(1986), and Fish Story (1995). Stein describes that “San Pedro Notes” reads as a more
encompassing attempt at social mapping than what is included in Attempt to Correlate
Social Class (see fig. 2).33
Looking at the entire series of California Stories, and in particular Sekula’s long
noir excursus in Cliffhanger, we can see how the artist touched on most of the locations
included in his sheet of notes—the Vietnamese village, the site of the Black man’s
escape, the second slide area, and the missile launch site. By comparing the notes to
the work, we can see more clearly how Sekula aims to render the social topography of
San Pedro through these histories of race, class, and social conflict, the social topog-
raphy of the Southern California coast is both imagined and pictured as a site of social
contestation.34 The text from Sekula’s Cliffhanger articulates this point in striking
detail, describing the sedimentation of a military presence where the past, present,
and future conditions of the military permeate the entire topography: the old military
training ground, the current practice ground of search-and-destroy missions, and the
missile base constructed to counter potential threats.35 Perhaps the real crime Sekula
alludes to in Cliffhanger is not the Black youth evading police detection but rather its
latent message of the military presence on the California coast.
Similar to Raymond Chandler’s novels, where the entire city is pictured as cor-
rupt, the crime in Cliffhanger appears not as a mere aberration of the landscape but
as a pervading characteristic of military Keynesianism, massive-scale spending to
fuel economic growth. Sekula’s Aerospace Folktales—a work about his unemployed
aerospace engineer father—showed how a rigid corporate-military existence was
experienced through the interior decoration of Sekula’s childhood home.36
In one photograph from the series, for instance, Sekula pictures a Cheyenne heli-
copter suspended above his brother’s bed like a dream catcher, a detail that was later

Witt / Allan Sekula 165

FIG. 7. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). “San Pedro Notes: A Geography,” from untitled
notebook (NB 009:001), detail of inside cover, 1975. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2016.M.22,
partial gift from Sally Stein, in memory of her husband, Allan Sekula. © Allan Sekula Studio.

166 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 reprised in his photograph Guns and Butter (1975/2012) from California Stories, where
grocery commodities are promoted and sold through the imagery of military aircraft.
In the context of the 1970s and the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War and related
conflicts, the reference to smoked meats in the image is a perverse but perhaps still
unconscious reference to how human flesh reacts to napalm, the weapon of choice of
the American military.
———
In 1997, a decade before Sekula exhibited the photographs for California Stories and Edit
Nine, he had presented the paper “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of Documentary” for the
Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California.37 It attempted to show how
the genre of documentary in Los Angeles had been “evicted” from the historical and
social imaginary. Sekula outlined thirteen theses through which social documentary
seemed “impossible” in that city. “Urban form resists all traditional forms of social
description.” “Physiognomy is impossible from the automobile. Distance frustrates
social comparison.”38 Sprawling and superficial, Los Angeles appears indifferent to the
violence of history and the immediacy of social struggle. Instead, Sekula called for a
dialectical counterargument that pushed up against the political economy of eviction
and historical forgetting that has symptomatically characterized the photographic
history of Los Angeles.
To make his argument, Sekula deployed a semiotic understanding of a distinc-
tion between a genre’s work that operated along existing codes (“overcoding”) and
work that moved within nonexistent codes to potential codes (“undercoding”).39 For
Sekula, previous art-historical interpretations have historically overcoded the genre
of documentary, in particular, urban and rural sites such as working-class housing
and the sidewalks of New York; the steel-mill towns of Pennsylvania’s Monongahela
Valley; and the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migratory agricultural workers of
the 1930s Dust Bowl. Meanwhile, the city of Los Angeles appears both “undercoded”
and “illegible” within the history of photography, unable to account for the condition
of working-class culture and representation, specifically the condition of unemployed
aerospace engineers, pictured in Aerospace Folktales, photographed by the artist as if he
were performing the role of a social worker.40
In the beginning of the 1970s, when Sekula was planning Aerospace Folktales, the
genre of documentary photography was conceived as a bad object, associated with
either the language of scientific positivism or that of liberal sentimental humanism. The
artist visualized this contrasting relation as the camera’s tendency to channel two con-
trasting views from the photographer-spectator: a view up at one’s superiors or a view
down at one’s inferiors. For Sekula, social documentary had inclined to look down at
the author’s inferiors—the unemployed, for instance—rather than horizontally across
to the social circumstances of the author, such as his own working-class upbringing.
Sekula posed the following question: “Was anyone actually in a position to
understand both the continuities and breaks with an earlier social documentary, the
disguised play with family photography and conventions of autobiography, and the

Witt / Allan Sekula 167

implicit rejection of the positivist anti-narrative bias of conceptual art?”41 Sekula con-
sidered the seeming illegibility of the work to be caught up with the landscape of labor
in Southern California, a place predominantly represented as a site of leisure, not of
work or unemployment.42 This dominant myth of Southern California obscures the
actual conditions of exploitive labor in the region: “Life is easy,” the artist wrote, “or at
least easier than elsewhere, how inappropriate to suggest that it is hard.”43
In many ways, Sekula’s argument for “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of Documen-
tary” drew upon one of the old tenets of the social history of art—a concern with the
constraints or blind spots of artistic labor and its relation to its public. Sekula intended
his remarks in this tradition to be interpreted as rhetorical; social documentary is
not impossible, but he imagines the genre as constrained by shortcomings, obstacles,
and barriers, such as the regionally specific effects of climate, spectacle, and ideology
on photographic work. This line of argumentation has been continued in different
contexts by theorist Jorge Ribalta, who has claimed that the critical documentary
practices of the 1930s remained largely illegible and suppressed during the Cold War,
a phenomenon that is related to how oppositional political formations, such as com-
munism and socialism, were repressed in the latter half of the twentieth century.44
For Sekula, writing in 1997, documentary photography in Southern California was
essentially a dead genre, occurring only marginally and cryptically elsewhere under-
stood, in his words, as a type of “zombie realism.”45 The zombie form, in this instance,
was a documentary mode “where the living speak only through the dead, or through
those states of being that fall between life and death.”46 In his Getty presentation and
manuscript, Sekula’s examples are few and far between: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pho-
tographs of the unemployed in Pershing Square (1947), Ed Ruscha’s Real Estate Opportuni-
ties (1970), and Maya Deren’s experimental films (i.e., Meshes of the Afternoon [1943]). In
Sekula’s frame, each would represent three “undercoders” of Los Angeles who activate
or play with afterlives of the image.47
———
In an unpublished note found in the Sekula papers at the GRI provisionally titled “Pho-
tography and the Dismal Science,” the artist notes that his concept of a “zombie real-
ism” was not a type of social realism (a label that his work is often too easily associated
with).48 The “dismal science” in the title is a direct reference to an 1844 anti-slavery
essay by Thomas Carlyle, where he proposed the “dismal science” as a new name for
political economy. Carlyle had arrived at this name as a sad, grim “proletarian” oppo-
sition to the gai savoir, or “gay science” of poetry and poetic liberty. This opposition
between the “dismal science” of political economy and the “gay science” of poetics
aligned closely with Sekula’s own theorization of photography as a discourse sus-
pended untenably between the imperatives invented by Romanticism.49
Under this conceptual apparatus, a double movement is always at play, Sekula
remarked, that discursively pits objectivism against subjectivism, rationalism against
irrationalism, positivism against metaphysics.50 In his article “The Traffic in Photo-
graphs,” Sekula outlined this dialectical play along the following terms:

168 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 [D]uring the second half of the nineteenth century, a fundamental tension devel-
oped between uses of photography that fulfill a bourgeois conception of the self
and uses that seek to establish and delimit the terrain of the other. Thus every
work of photographic art has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the archives
of the police. To the extent that bourgeois society depends on the systematic
defense of property relations, to the extent that the legal basis of the self lies in
property rights, every proper portrait of a “man of genius” made by a “man of
genius” has its counterpart in a mug shot. Both attempts are motivated by an
uneasy belief in the category of the individual. Thus also, every romantic land-
scape finds its deadly echo in the aerial view of a targeted terrain. And to the
extent that modern sexuality has been invented and channeled by organized
medicine, every eroticized view of the body bears a covert relation to the clinical
depiction of anatomy.51

In the contemporary moment, photography aspires to the standing of a poetic and

lyrical science (tethered to forms of self-expression, craft, and symbolic-metaphorical
interpretation), while seeking to disavow its complex ties to the dismal science of
the economy (photography’s connection to mere indexical recording, copying, public
relations, and advertising). The realization of photography as a “dismal art” recog-
nizes its servitude to economic interests, in Sekula’s words, “cataloguing the world’s
resources, harnessed to advertising and the cycles of commodity fetishism.”52 In this
way, he insists that the only way to counter this logic is to revive the dismal science of
the medium and to practice a form of “zombie realism,” a mode of photographic work
that prefers “the particularity of the specifically photographic as the first step toward
a yet to be achieved universality, rather than opting for the false universality of the
generalized postmodern of the pictorial.”53
At the outset, Sekula admits that the category of “zombie realism” is an elastic
one. He details a list of seven artists and works that exemplify this “zombie” form. It
is striking that the majority of Sekula’s examples do not come from still photography,
as one might expect, but rather from cinema, in particular the camp B movies of John
Waters and George Romero—evidenced in their portraits of Baltimore (Waters) and
Pittsburgh (Romero)—as well as the neo-realist work of Charles Burnett and Billy
Woodberry in South Central Los Angeles. What is unique about these filmmakers,
Sekula states, is that Waters, Romero, Burnett, and Woodberry all deal with regionally
specific questions around economically working-class cities that were central to the
first and second industrial revolutions but have now been marginalized, and some-
what “bizarrely” transformed by post-Fordism in what Sekula calls a “carnivalesque
reworking.”54 The realist gesture found in this work is its capacity to address the trans-
formation that takes place in these working-class cities and sites.
Sekula’s second example of “zombie realism” includes the documentary films of
what he calls the “phenomenology of defeat,” as exemplified in Barbara Kopple’s Ameri-
can Dream (1990) and Susan Meiselas’s Pictures from a Revolution (1991)—films that were

Witt / Allan Sekula 169

premised on advancing a type of “lucid revolutionary pessimism” in their reworking
of the negative experience.55 His third example stems from documentary films of a
quasi-surrealist or situationist mapping together of “heterogeneous economic spaces.”
Sekula’s principle example here is Johan van der Keuken’s Het witte kasteel (The white
castle) (1973) and De wag naar het zuiden (The way south) (1981). A fourth example of
“zombie realism” includes the essay films of automation and panoptical viewpoints as
encountered in Harun Farocki’s Wie man sieht (As you see) (1986) and Bilder der Welt
und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the world and inscription of war) (1988). He also
includes, somewhat ambivalently, the work of Jeff Wall and Sebastião Salgado. And
as a conclusion of sorts, Sekula nominates his own work as an example of “zombie
realism.”
In contrast to Wall and Salgado, whose work Sekula read as a type of practice
premised on a desire for pictorial closure, his own strategy attempted to resist such
closure. To this end, he emphasized the sequential presentation of photography, the
“montage of associations” that are found in each sequence but also among different
projects throughout his career and photographs from his studio. He explains that the
“montage of associations” encountered throughout his work relies on the potential
reversibility of photographic images as well as in the open, indeterminate act of read-
ing. The emphasis on indeterminacy, he argues, is consistent with still photography’s
fundamental aesthetic quality: the quality of contingency, a quality that he reads as
somewhat obscured and forgotten in the current historical moment and its emphasis
on the elaborate photographic “stagecraft” in the work of Wall and others.
Speaking of Fish Story specifically, Sekula claimed that even though certain cit-
ies, like his native Los Angeles, might be visually overdetermined by a particular
economic tint, texture, or spectacle, what one finds in these spaces is always subject
to contingency. “The problem of zombie realism,” he concluded, “is to move with some
agility between a respect for contingency and a respect for overdetermination.” A
materialist photographic practice, he states further, paraphrasing the poet Stéphane
Mallarmé, “must respect the throw of the dice.”56
———
What is striking about Sekula’s emphasis on photographic contingency and indetermi-
nacy is how the two operations are encountered in the image and its sequence, as well
as within the photographer’s archive. At no point during my research into Sekula’s life
and work had I come across the photographs published in his project Edit Nine. The art-
ist’s photographs had not even been reproduced or discussed in the exhibition catalog
for the show in which the work was presented, This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in
Los Angeles Photographs (14 June–16 September 2008).57 I had only encountered Edit Nine
by chance when viewing the installation shots featured in the artist’s archive at the GRI
and reading an early sketch of the project in the artist’s notebooks.
According to a note from the early days of the project, Sekula had originally titled
the work The Octopus and the Glass Bees as a conceptual fusion of two novels from the
previous century, Frank Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and Ernst

170 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 Jünger’s The Glass Bees (1957). Frank Norris’s fin de siècle novel narrates the pitched
battles between the wheat farmers of California and the railroad monopolies on which
the Huntington family’s wealth was founded. In contrast, Jünger’s postwar science-
fiction novel The Glass Bees narrates an uncanny vision of a near-future dystopia—a
world subjected to unending civil war where a businessman, Zapparoni, “a hybrid of
Bill Gates and Walt Disney,” wields corporate control through the coupling of infor-
mation technology, entertainment, and robotics.58 The glass bees of his robotics firm
not only are more efficient than real bees but also appear to anticipate the dispersed
structure of the internet (the bees, to quote a line from the novel, “resembled less a
hive than an automated telephone exchange”).59 When viewed together, the two novels
span the economic history of California—agrarian farms to Silicon Valley—but the
juxtaposition, as the artist cites in his notebooks, also provides a peculiar lens through
which to explore the grounds of the Huntington as both a repository and showcase of
Los Angeles photography.60 In the end, however, the artist scrapped any direct refer-
ence to the two books and simply titled the work Edit Nine.
One of the central threads of The Glass Bees traces the afterlives of agrarian prac-
tices in Los Angeles with images of leaf blowers, neighborhood gardeners, and grass
cutters (fig. 8), and a photograph of the artist’s partner. The picture of Sally Stein,
taken in the couple’s backyard, shows her holding a gnarled root in her left hand and
a mop in her right. Redolent of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), the

FIG. 8. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Getty Gardener, from the series Edit Nine, 2008.
Solvent-based inkjet on Sintra, 121.9 × 172.7 cm. © Allan Sekula Studio.

Witt / Allan Sekula 171

FIG. 9. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Oiko nomos, from the series Edit Nine, 2008. Solvent-
based inkjet on Sintra, 121.9 × 172.7 cm. © Allan Sekula Studio.

FIG. 10. — Installation view of Allan Sekula’s Oiko nomos, from the series Edit Nine, 2008, in
This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs, Huntington Library, Art Museum,
and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, 2008. © Allan Sekula Studio.

172 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 FIG. 11. — Allan Sekula (American, 1951–2013). Shoot Me, I Have a Stick, from Edit Nine, 2008. Solvent-
based inkjet on Sintra, 121.9 × 172.7 cm. © Allan Sekula Studio.

artist titled the work Oiko nomos, a subtle play on the Greek word oikonomos (manager
of the household) and on oikonomia (economy) (fig. 9). By emphasizing the split, the
work adopts a classically Marxist feminist perspective, where the household is framed
and understood as the first unit of the economy, the sine qua non, as Marx puts it. And
yet, the split is also presented as a playful gesture: an inside joke between photogra-
pher and sitter. Although the photograph of Stein in her nightgown might seem out of
place in Edit Nine, especially on the hallowed grounds of the Huntington, this famil-
ial and sentimental image is evocative of many found in the artist’s files at the GRI—
photographs of the artist, his partner, or his friends clowning before the camera (fig. 10).
The image is no anomaly. Ever since the family photographs sequenced in the
artist’s early Aerospace Folktales or the lesser-known Meditations on a Triptych (1973),
the artist was always attempting to rethink the codes and conventions of family pho-
tography. Edit Nine is no exception, but the image, unlike these two earlier projects, is
integrated within a more dispersed sequence, which links it with the city’s gardeners
to an abandoned antiaircraft missile-launching site, an installation of new dockyard
cranes from China, and an unnerving and prescient image of a single Black man
holding up a sign with the words “L.A.P.D. INTERNAL AFFAIRS, CROOKS INVES-
TIGATING CROOKS! Shoot me I have a stick!” (fig. 11). The image is one of defiance
and obstinacy but also a knowing pun on the aggressive acts of photography. In the
sequence, it is placed alongside a photograph of Los Angeles riot police standing guard

Witt / Allan Sekula 173

FIG. 12. — Installation view of Allan Sekula’s Riot Squad, from the series Edit Nine, 2008, in This
Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and
Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, 2008. © Allan Sekula Studio.

on the city’s streets, plastic zip ties slung from their belts like lassos, anticipating the
violence to come.
Here we have come full circle to Sekula’s vision of California: the region’s social
topography pictured as a site of social strife, class war, land grabs, ethnic cleansing,
race war, repression, and empire. Although his success in visualizing these forces is
debatable, what appears unequivocal is how the work resonates in the present. Seku-
la’s dispossessed, his unemployed, his precariously employed, his victims of police
violence, his young men and women evading police detection are as much a part of
our present as they were his.
As he walked the Huntington grounds to document the installation in the sum-
mer of 2008, Sekula must have taken pleasure in encountering by chance his pho-
tograph of the LAPD riot squad placed next to a sign with the word “Paradise” at the
left of the view, pointing toward the entrance to the exhibition, and to the right of the
photograph, a landscaper on the lawn of the Huntington, edging the grass (fig. 12).
Pictured behind the landscaper are two photographs: the image of the abandoned
antiaircraft missile testing site and the photograph of a Getty gardener deftly scaling
the museum’s hillside (see fig. 8). Based on Sekula’s framing, “paradise” is situated to
the left of the image, outside of the frame, at a distance from the police and abandoned
military ruin, but it is also distanced from the dismal, grim realities of wage labor.
Sekula’s camera stands at the crossroads.

Andrew Witt is the 2018–21 Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching
Fellow at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte of Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.

174 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)

 Notes
Versions of this paper have been pre-
sented at a number of institutions, and I would
like to thank the organizers and audiences at
each for their comments and feedback. For their
insightful advice and encouragement, I would
like to thank especially Mary Christian, Nate
Crompton, Kasia Falęcka, Briony Fer, Alex-
andra Fraser, Lauren Gendler, Zanna Gilbert,
Larne Abse Gogarty, Rye Dag Holmboe, Amy
Kazymerchyk, Samantha Krusi, Afonso Dias
Ramos, Stephanie Schwartz, Sally Stein, and Ina
Steiner. I am grateful to the Terra Foundation for
American Art and the Getty Research Institute,
which enabled me to undertake research for this
project.
1. “A negative,” art historian Abigail
Solomon-Godeau wrote, “is an unrealized image.”
See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Inventing Vivian
Maier,” Photography after Photography: Gender,
Genre, History (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017), 147.
2. Sekula’s widow, Sally Stein, wrote in
an e-mail to the author: “For another example,
during a crisis at MOCA [Museum of Contempo-
rary Art, Los Angeles] when it wasn’t certain the
contemporary museum would continue for lack
of funds and ongoing trustee support, there were
numerous meetings of committed artists and art
students and others from the region who wanted
to find a way forward, and I know he shot many
rolls there.” Sally Stein, e-mail to the author, 18
November 2020.
3. E-mail from Sally Stein to the author, 18
November 2020.
4. The artist mentions the concept of the
“disassembled movie” in conversation with
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh for the exhibition catalog
Performance under Working Conditions: “By the
time I had begun working earnestly on Aerospace
Folktales in 1972, I was committed to the idea
that a photographic project was of necessity
a matter of editing and sequencing, of parallel
tracks for voice and image and text, more or less
the strategy of the ‘disassembled movie’ that I
recorded in my notes at the time. This ‘disas-
sembled movie’ would in this case function as
an extended portrait, not of an autonomous
individual, but of family members in relation to
one another and to the structuring of the familial
institution through ideology and socialization.
The challenge was to link the sort of micro-
sociological observations that are cast up for the
camera or tape recorder—characteristic turns
of phrase, small habitual gestures—to a broader
pattern of meaning.” See Allan Sekula and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conversation between
Allan Sekula and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in
Performance under Working Conditions, ed. Sabine
Breitwieser (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2003),
25.
5. Sekula makes a distinction between
photographic sequences and photographic series
in an extended conversation with Debra Rising
in the exhibition catalog Dismal Science: Photo
Works 1972–1996: “The photographic sequence
is an alternative to the dominant institutional
model for organizing photographs in re-sortable
groups: the curatorial and bureaucratic model of
the archive and the series. Sequences can in fact
contain series, can even be organized from the
interweaving of serial elements, but the opposite
is not the case. Series introduce metronomic
regularity to the parade of photographs, allow-
ing individual images to be bought and sold
with no compunction about loss of complexity
of meaning. This is in fact one pleasure of the
series. Sequential organization, and the parallel
construction of textual elements, allows a photo-
graphic work to function as a novel or film might,
with a high and more complex level of formal
unity. However, the openness of the sequential
ensemble constitutes a crucial difference with
cinema: again, there is no unilinear dictatorship
of the projector.” See Debra Rising, “Imaginary
Economies: An Interview with Allan Sekula,”
in Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972–1996, exh.
cat. (Normal: University Galleries, Illinois State
University, 1999), 249.
6. See Sekula and Buchloh, “Conversation,”
21–55.
7. Sally Stein, “‘Back to the Drawing Board’:
Maritime Themes and Discursive Crosscurrents
in the Notebooks of Allan Sekula,” in Daniela
Zyman, Cory Scozzari, and Allan Sekula, Allan
Sekula: Okeanos (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 64.
8. This question troubled the artist so much
that he wrote thirteen theses on the topic for
an essay, which was published posthumously:
Allan Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” in Facing the Music: Documenting
Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Redevelopment
of Downtown Los Angeles, exh. cat. (Los Angeles:
East of Borneo Books, 2015), 171–80.
9. See Allan Sekula, “Notes for a Talk at
the Rijksakademie,” 3 December 1990, n.p., in
Warsaw Miscellaneous Notes, 1990, Allan Sekula
papers, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute
(GRI), 2016.M.22, box 5, folder 5.
Witt / Allan Sekula 175
 10. Allan Sekula, “Allan Sekula: California Sto-
ries,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, press release,
5 November 2011–7 January 2012.
11. Despite the subtle differences between
the ten photographers included in the exhibition,
the element that united them was the emphasis
on the “anthropological” aspect of the project.
Looking back on his project, Baltz saw himself as
an “anthropologist from a different solar system.”
“What I was interested in,” Baltz claimed, “was
the phenomena of the place. Not the thing
itself but the effect of it: the effect of this kind
of urbanization, the effect of this kind of living,
the effect of this kind of building. What kind of
people would come out of this? What kind of
new world was being built here? Was it a world
people could live in? Really?” See David Campany,
Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and
Film, exh. cat. (Paris: Bal, 2010), 87.
12. Sekula’s interest in the social topography
of Southern California was also evidenced in
the course “Documentary Topologies,” which he
co-taught with the geographer Mike Davis at
CalArts in autumn 1990. A few years back I asked
Davis about that course; he responded with an
e-mail, which is worth quoting at length. “[The
course] was based on field trips that included a
wonderful day-long tour of the port led by Allan.
We also visited Trona, a potash mining town
located in a saline lake bed near Death Valley.
Some connoisseurs consider it the most hellish
town in North America; nothing can grow in
this hyper-alkaline landscape so the local high
school football team plays on salt. We arrived at
night when it was still 95 degrees and two of the
students were too scared to get out of the van.
We also went to my birthplace, Fontana, and had
breakfast at the Cherry St. truck stop (familiar
to me from a financially disastrous return to
long-distance trucking the previous year). I found
one of our plucky female students in the men’s
room photographing the condom dispenser next
to the urinals. Since the stop was at that time a
major retail outlet for meth (Black Molly), twelve
kids toting cameras was rather hair-raising.” Mike
Davis, e-mail to the author, 21 August 2015.
13. Allan Sekula, “Allan Sekula: California
Stories,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, exhibition
handout, 5 November 2011–7 January 2012.
14. To this day, the reason for the withdrawal
remains unclear to both Sekula’s former gallery
as well as Ina Steiner, current manager of the
Allan Sekula Studio.
15. Accident Prone reverses the conventional
account of the comic who stages the body in
176 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)
and through the comic’s own faults or weak-
nesses. Slovenian philosopher and psychoana-
lytic theorist Alenka Zupančič has emphasized
the indestructible and comic characters in her
retheorization of the genre in her study The
Odd One In (Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In
[Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008]). This aspect
of the comic aligns with Freud’s notion of the
comic as a liberating force: the subject’s ego,
Freud writes, “refuses to be hurt by the arrows of
reality or to be compelled to suffer. It insists that
it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside
world, in fact, that these are merely occasions
for affording pleasure.” Sigmund Freud, quoted
in Andre Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans.
Mark Polizzotti (London: Telegram, 1997), 24; see
also Zupančič, The Odd One In, 49.
16. For a contextualization of the activities
of this group, see Jorge Ribalta, “The San Diego
Group with Fred Lonidier and Martha Rosler,” in
Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and
the Critique of Modernism, Essays and Documents
(1972–1991) (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofía, 2015), 78–89.
17. On a more expansive terrain, these
seriocomic practices could be said to rework and
politically inflect the comic project of conceptual
art related to artists such as John Baldessari,
Douglas Huebler, and Bruce Nauman. Concep-
tual art viewed through the lens of humor, as
art historian Heather Diack has shown, is not
so much the “art of administration,” as argued
by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, but rather what Mel
Bochner called “joke art” or what Robert Smith-
son acknowledged as contemporary art’s “cosmic
sense of humor.” See Heather Diack, “The Gravity
of Levity: Humour as Conceptual Critique,” in
“Humour in the Visual Arts and Visual Culture:
Practices, Theories, and Histories,” ed. Dominic
Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Jean-Philippe Uzel,
special issue, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne,
Canadian Art Review 37, no. 1 (2012): 76.
18. Sekula remarked on these early perfor-
mances such as Box Car and Meat Mass in the
following manner: “So early on I was trying to
provoke a clash with large technical and eco-
nomic systems. But action art seemed to devolve
into artistic self-aggrandizement. I became less
interested in the petty criminal and transient
as romantic disguises, and more interested in
documentation, especially the ambiguity of the
documentary function and the esthetic mod-
esty and worldliness of the photograph. I was
drawn to a very mundane idea of documentary:
something very indirect, uninfected by obvious
 esthetic treatment. And I began to think that
it must be possible to photograph everyday
life—leaving a factory, or housework—as if it
were performance.” See Debra Rising, “Imaginary
Economies: An Interview with Allan Sekula,” in
Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972–1996 (Normal:
University Galleries, Illinois State University,
1999), 240.
19. Sekula makes this point in two interviews.
See Allan Sekula, “Allan Sekula Speaks with
Carles Guerra,” in A Conversation with Photog-
raphers (Madrid: La Fábrica and Fundación
Telefónica, 2005), 34; and Sekula and Buchloh,
“Conversation,” 22–23.
20. Sekula, “Allan Sekula réalisme critique:
Interview / The Critical Realism of Allan Sekula:
Interview,” Art Press 240 (November 1998): 20–26.
21. As Stein has written on Attempt to Corre-
late Social Class with Elevation above Main Harbor
Channel, San Pedro, July 1975, Sekula sketched an
encompassing note, “San Pedro: A Geography,”
which mapped an early ambition of the project.
Although that particular idea was never fully
realized, the project’s goals of mapping economic
relations on the social landscape were taken up
in the photo research projects Sketch for a Geog-
raphy Lesson (1983) and Canadian Notes (1986).
22. To quote Fredric J. Schwartz on the
notion: physiognomy is the concept that serves
as a form of perception that “grasps the ele-
ments of the world, be they faces or landscapes,
cultures or works of art, as wholes, spontane-
ously and in an instant.” See Fredric J. Schwartz,
Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in
Twentieth-Century Germany (London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 177.
23. In opposition to dominant ideas that link
physiognomy with racist and supremacist ideas
of superiority and social control, what we see in
the mobilization of the concept of physiognomy
in the work of Benjamin and other members of
the Frankfurt school is the means through which
the body is capable of articulating a practice of
resistance where the mobilization of its form of
thinking conveys traces of negativity, struggle,
and freedom, or, in the case of Sekula, comedy.
Lisa Yun Lee makes precisely this argument
in her study of corporeality in the thought of
Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt school:
“[p]hysiognomics,” Yun Lee writes, “are revealing
about society because like gesture, they express
a moment of freedom.” In relation to this argu-
ment, Schwartz has shown how physiognomic
theories of culture have been mobilized during
moments of political crisis. See Lisa Yun Lee,
Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philoso-
phy of T. W. Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2005),
103. See Schwartz, Blind Spots, 178. For the Ben-
jamin quote, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light:
Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), xviii.
24. Sekula had studied under Baldessari as
early as 1968 and remembered being struck by
two of Ruscha’s books in particular, Some Los
Angeles Apartments (1965) and Real Estate Oppor-
tunities (1970), but did not remember seeing
Royal Road Test (1971) until later. As an employee
at the art and music library at UCSD, Sekula
remembered looking at a number of other photo-
books, among them: Eadweard Muybridge’s Ani-
mal Locomotion, Walker Evans and James Agee’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Richard Avedon
and James Baldwin’s Nothing Personal, Dorothea
Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus, August
Sander’s Men without Masks, and Kurt Tucholsky
and John Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland
über alles. See Sekula and Buchloh, “Conversa-
tion,” 22–23.
25. Sekula’s vision, moreover, is closer to the
vision of Ray Bradbury’s surveillance nightmare,
Fahrenheit 451 (1953), where drivers and automo-
biles stalk the streets of an unspecified Midwest
town, hunting animals and humans alike. Brad-
bury’s disdain for the automobile and the street
came to the fore in Fahrenheit 451, a book written
in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library.
26. See Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The
Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2014), 58.
27. Rosler partially attributes this to their
teacher, friend, and mentor David Antin: “Our
main influence and mentor in the department
was David Antin. . . . He insisted that thought
was formed in language, not visual images, and
thus that there was no ‘meaning’ without words,
which was important for our group.” See Ribalta,
“The San Diego Group,” 79.
28. Jane Livingston, The New York School: Pho-
tographs, 1936–1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori,
& Chang, 1992), 259.
29. Thomas Crow, “The Art of the Fugitive in
1970s Los Angeles: Runaway Self-Consciousness,”
in Under the Big Black Sun (Los Angeles: Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2011), 47.
30. In the novels of Raymond Chandler and
Ross Macdonald, the criminal class whose milieu
is predominately rich and white have escaped
their crimes on Los Angeles flatlands and have
bunkered themselves in coastal gated
communities.
Witt / Allan Sekula 177
 31. In a way, the detective’s movements
through the city (or the coast highway), could be
interpreted as a type of slum tourism. Norman M.
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the
Erasure of Memory (London: Verso, 1998), 79.
32. Klein, The History of Forgetting, 79.
33. See Stein, “‘Back to the Drawing Board,’”
64.
34. The shoreline appears as a psychically
charged locus of suspicion, disaster, and unease.
In the noir genre, these human-made land-
scapes—the Pacific Coast Highway, the truck
stop, and a cliff’s edge—often read as literary
ciphers of deception.
35. In the 2003 interview with Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, the artist emphasized how the context
of a militarized UCSD campus had a formative
role in his education: “The Southeast Asian war
was very present, because San Diego was so
heavily militarized. Navy jet fighters in jungle
camouflage from the nearby Miramar Naval Air
Station would buzz the campus after every dem-
onstration, and often without even that provoca-
tion. . . . The university in this context was less an
ivory tower than one might imagine, especially
since the San Diego campus ranked third or
fourth in the country in receiving research funds
from the Pentagon. There was a whole “under-
ground geography” to the campus: students
living in utility tunnels and using them for
clandestine access to research labs when staging
sit-ins. By the spring of 1970, at the time of the
Cambodia invasion, a student named George
Winne followed the example set by Buddhist
monks in Saigon and immolated himself on the
central plaza of the campus in protest against
the war.” See Sekula and Buchloh, “Conversa-
tion,” 31.
36. Allan Sekula, “War without Bodies,”
lecture, Southern California Institute of Architec-
ture, 16 February 1996, http://sma.sciarc.edu
/video/allan-sekula-2/.
37. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,”171–80.
38. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 175.
39. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 171.
40. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 172.
41. Sekula’s comments on the illegibility of
Aerospace Folktales is also discussed at length
in Sekula and Buchloh, “Conversation,” 35–38;
Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of Docu-
mentary,” 172.
178 Getty Research Journal, No. 14 (2021)
42. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 172.
43. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 172.
44. Jorge Ribalta, The Worker Photography
Movement, 1926–1939: Essays and Documents
(Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofía, 2011).
45. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 180.
46. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 180.
47. Sekula, “Los Angeles: The Graveyard of
Documentary,” 180.
48. Allan Sekula, “Photography and the Dismal
Science,” unpublished manuscript, 5 April 1992,
Sekula papers, GRI, 2016.M.22, box 5, folder 6.
49. Photography’s antinomic structure is con-
sistently elaborated by Sekula in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, and later revised in his essay
published in the photographic book TITANIC’s
wake (2003). See Allan Sekula, TITANIC’s wake
(Cherbourg: Le Point du Jour, 2003). His argu-
ment takes its cue from the Hungarian Marxist
philosopher Georg Lukács, who argues in
History and Class Consciousness (1923) that the
philosophical dualism of subject and object in
bourgeois society mirrors the logic of the com-
modity fetish in capitalist society. Lukács’s read-
ing of Marx emphasizes the ways through which
human social relation under capitalism takes on
an objective appearance whereas objects are
invested with illusory subjectivity. See Georg
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London:
Verso, 2000).
50. Sekula, “Photography and the Dismal Sci-
ence,” n.p.
51. Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,”
Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 16. His method
proceeded from the imperative to understand
the “social character” of what the artist had
termed “the traffic in photographs.” This “traffic”
is deployed both literally and metaphorically.
Understood literally, it includes the social
production, circulation, and reception of photo-
graphs in a society based on commodity produc-
tion and exchange. Understood metaphorically,
the notion of traffic suggests for him the peculiar
way in which photographic meaning and the
discourse on photography is characterized by an
incessant oscillation through “the antinomies of
bourgeois thought”—an oscillation determined
by the commodity form. See Sekula, “Introduc-
tion,” in Photography against the Grain: Essays and
Photo Works 1973–1983 (Nova Scotia: Press of the
 Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), xv.
More recently, a collection of Sekula’s essays on
the traffic of photographs has been published
by Mack Books. See Allan Sekula, Art Isn’t Fair:
Further Essays on the Traffic in Photographs and
Related Media, ed. Sally Stein and Ina Steiner
(London: Mack Books, 2020).
52. Sekula, “Notes for a Talk at the Rijksakad-
emie,” n.p.
53. Emphasis in original. Sekula, “Photogra-
phy and the Dismal Science,” n.p.
54. Sekula, “Photography and the Dismal
Science,” n.p.
55. Sekula, “Photography and the Dismal
Science,” n.p.
56. Sekula, “Photography and the Dismal
Science,” n.p.
57. Claudia Bohn-Spector and Jennifer A.
Watts, This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape
in Los Angeles Photographs (New York, London:
Merrel, 2008).
58. Bruce Sterling, “Introduction,” in Ernst
Jünger et al., The Glass Bees (New York: New York
Review of Books, 1957, 2000), 7.
59. Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees [1957] (New
York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1991), 94.
60. In a notebook from 2008 dedicated to the
Huntington project, Sekula insists on the value
of aligning photography with literature. “Novels
and other prose works,” he claims, “can offer
guideposts for photography.” See Allan Sekula,
“[Edit Nine]: Huntington Project,” 2008, Sekula
papers, GRI, 2016.M.22, box 13, folder 9.
Witt / Allan Sekula 179