UC Berkeley

This monographic dissertation analyzes the photography-based artwork of Allan Sekula (1951–2013) by focusing on the contested status of the human figure in his works made from 1971 to 2000. The first part situates his photography within a struggle over documents and documentation in Southern California during the Vietnam War era, showing how his early works engage not only with the use of photographic documents by conceptual art, but also with activist antiwar journalism in underground newspapers as well as surveillance photographs and mug shots made by the police. In addition to exploring evidentiary photography’s role in both art and politics, the dissertation also investigates how Sekula adopts a performative model of portraiture that acknowledges the social relations and material infrastructure that allows for picture-making to take place, especially the relation between viewer and subject. It contextualizes this performative portraiture as partly a struggle over realism that rejects photorealism in painting while adopting Brechtian aesthetics in photography. The second part explores how Sekula revives the neglected genre of the group portrait, contrasting his works that depict crowds of workers or his own family with the representations of public life by both the business corporation and liberal social documentary. It argues that Sekula’s artworks ultimately aim, through their use of sequential montage, or the quasinarrative sequencing of multiple still images, to make visible transindividual forms of social life. It shows how Sekula’s works weave together singularity and collectivity in ways that contest the usual partitions of social and economic life, especially the global division of labor, which he address in his late works that document maritime space, containerized shipping, and the political and spatial changes wrought by globalization. It concludes by demonstrating how Sekula’s practical aesthetics involve a documentary ethic of responding to the given that is implicitly in tension with the iconoclastic model of ideology critique at work in many of his critical texts. This documentary ethic can be described as what Sekula called “sympathetic materialism,” an ethico-political orientation of sensitivity, receptivity, or exposure to bodily vulnerability and suffering that goes beyond the iconography of labor and Marxian politics with which he is commonly associated.