On the book and the author:
Allan Sekula is among those American critics and art historians who revolutionised ways of thinking about photography at the turn of the 1970s and ‘80s. Earlier conceived as autonomous images, photography came to be interpreted in a social context. Sekula’s texts demonstrate that every photograph, even those seemingly devoted to formal issues, always serve as a field of conflict for various social, political and economic groups. The author’s main subject of interest is documentary photography in all its manifestations – whether socially engaged, made in the atelier or by police, anthropological, medical, or packaged as art.

Sekula is the author of many critical texts on contemporary photography. Since 1973 he has mainly written extensive texts to accompany his own artistic work. In combining photographs with an essay of sometimes over a dozen pages, the author unveils and deconstructs the inherited, mechanical apprehension of photography.

This volume includes a representative selection of Sekula’s critical texts – beginning with his first essays, which reveal his fascination for French structuralism, through his mature work that appears in textbooks on the issue of the archive, to a piece from recent years, showing the evolution of Sekula’s work towards the literary essay.

This collection is the first translation of Allan Sekula’s work into Polish, and the first anthology of the author’s writings to be published in a language other than English.

13.05.2010, 7:00 p.m.
A presentation of Allan Sekula’s book The Social Use of Photography (Publisher: UWU) (only Polish!)
Camelot Gallery & Imago Mundi Foundation Gallery, 17 św. Tomasza st.

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