Allan Sekula Quotes

United States, Photographer
January 15, 1951 – August, 10, 2013.

Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic. From 1985 until his death in 2013, he taught at California Institute of the Arts. His work frequently focused on large economic systems, or "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."

Also known as Writer, Film Maker

The making of a human likeness on film is a political act.

Allan Sekula
- Political
- Human
- Likeness
Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.

Allan Sekula

The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.

Allan Sekula
How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

Allan Sekula
Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.

Allan Sekula
Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Allan Sekula
Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.

Allan Sekula
The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.

Allan Sekula