Gold Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works [pdf]

by Allan Sekula

https://www.amazon.com/Photography-Against-Grain-1973-1983-2016-10-01/dp/B01NGZYZ02



Allan Sekula's classic study is one of the most important books about photography theory and visual culture, and it has been out of print for decades.

Sekula, one of the few insightful critics of photography, published this book when he was a visiting professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984. The photographs, taken in a mining area of Nova Scotia, were chose by him from a larger body of pictures. While articulating a semiotics of the photograph, he provides commentary that put the photographs into a meaningful social context and describes how they were an important part of the area's visual culture. In fact, Sekula was one of the first to explore seriously "the invention of photographic meaning." Beginning from the premiss that photographic literacy is learned, the studies collected here consider the swings of the hermeneutic pendulum.

Photography, he argued, had no specific content; rather it was suspended between what he called the "chattering ghosts of bourgeois art and bourgeois science which have haunted photography from its inception." The champions of photography shift from expressive affect to seemingly objective observation, often opting for a melange of these incompatible perspectives. Flip-flopping from optical pleasure to visual truth, from positivism to romantic metaphysics, photography seems adrift, pulled by the tides. He felt that attitudes to industrial production provided the mass that caused the swells and flows. The power of his account stems from his refusal to fix photographic meaning at any single point on this semantic horizon, focusing on movement and process, while declining to cast polysemy as liberation. If the claim to neutral observation served all manner of political masters, photographic art, he argued, offered ideological cover for industrial society and alienated work, suggesting that destructive technics could be humanized. He demonstrated how, on the basis of the pendulum’s swing, the arch-aesthete Alfred Stieglitz and social reformer Lewis Hine could be made to switch places and he illustrated the absurdity of the art market’s fetishization of World War I aerial-reconnaissance pictures, just because Edward Steichen commanded the unit.

It is now difficult to recall the transformative effect of these arguments that recast an entire debate.

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