About this Event
Allan Sekula (1951-2013) was a renowned North American photographer, award-winning filmmaker, cultural theorist, and political activist.
Based on our recently co-written monograph Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula (Verso 2025), we will present a detailed interpretation of the slide sequence Waiting for Tear Gas (White Globe to Black) of 1999/2000. We argue that Sekula found a form for presenting the experience of the anti-capitalist crowd at the 3rd Ministerial Gathering of the World Trade Organisation held in Seattle at the end of 1999.
Commentaries on the work of Sekula typically focus on his political choice of subjects: work, globalisation, the maritime economy and protest. Some even suggest that he was an inadequate image maker, whose realist impulse was dominated by political ideas. Here, drawing on an insight from Kaja Silverman, we look at the way Sekula used colour to give form to his sequence – twice over – creating a double or diurnal cycle that moves from critical realism to critical irrealism. Colour, we argue, takes sides in Waiting for Tear Gas, becoming itself a participant in the push-and-pull of political opposition to capitalist globalisation.
Bios:
Gail Day’s most recent book is Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula, co-written with Steve Edwards. Her monograph Dialectical Passions: Negation and Postwar Art Theory was shortlisted for the Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Prize. Gail is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at the University of Leeds. She co-convenes the Marxism in Culture research seminar and collaborated on the research programme Aesthetic Form & Uneven Modernity with Centro de Estudos Desmanche e Formação de Sistemas Simbólicos at Universidade de São Paulo.
Steve Edwards is Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has previously held chairs at the Open University and at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006); Photography: A Very Short Introduction(2006); Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012); and with Gail Day, Amphibious Realities: Allan Sekula’s Documentary Poetics (2025). He is currently completing Daguerreotypes: Patents, Persons, and Property in Britain, 1840-1855. He is chair of the editorial group for Oxford Art Journal, a member of the editorial collective for the Historical Materialism book series (Brill/Haymarket), and a convenor for the long-running University of London research seminar Marxism in Culture.
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Event venue & nearby stays
West Court, Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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