![]() As a result contemporary investigators are faced with a radical shift in the status of the photographs, which have tran-sitioned from pieces of evidence into speechless documentary ruins of sorts. Department's photographic collection in this sense presents just a glimpse of a much bigger problem - the meaning of the politics while forming an 52 archive and its transformations in time. Special attention is given to its isolation and new links, established by the archivists while rearranging the photographic material in order to include collection of the former chief political surveillance agency of the Russian Empire into the structure of its Soviet successor. This article focuses primarily on the photographic collection of the Police Department, currently hosted by the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). POLICE ARCHIVE: PHOTOGRAPHY, POWER AND SPECTATOR Allan was intellectually and personally generous, funny and kind. And there’s no better essay on what Allan called the tendentiousness of images than The Invention of Photographic Meaning. If witnessing the creation of Fish Story served as a model of an art practice driven by intense love of learning, The Body and the Archive deeply informed my interest in corporeality and representation. We witnessed his wide-ranging curiosity, his command of the disparate métiers of economics, history, philosophy and visual culture, and his ability to synthesize them into a complex and rigorous vision. These were the great gifts of Allan’s teaching. ![]() Fish Story pulled back the curtain on the dematerialized myths of late capitalism with humanity, lyricism and an encyclopedic understanding of the cultural imaginary. I studied with Allan while he was working on Fish Story, and his History and Photography and Visual Semiotics were extended lessons through the lens of this remarkable book. You will be missed.Īrtist and CalArts School of Art Dean, Thomas Lawson, on Allan Sekula. I will remember Allan for his body of work, his generous outlook on art education, and his undying devotion to disseminating the need for art’s role as a critical apparatus. One cannot think about the image, appropriation, collage, and history without thinking about Allan Sekula. It is odd that just this past Friday, in thinking about the history of appropriation and it’s relationship to art and critique, I thought of Allan’s seminal essay, On the Invention of Photographic Meaning. Rather, Allan saw teaching and writing as a crucial and necessary part of his praxis. ![]() Rare in that he practiced what he taught, and in line with the small number of teachers that I respect, Allan did not see teaching as an impediment to his artistic practice. Anyone who ever studied with Allan or heard him speak will understand why.Īllan was not only a great artist, he was a rare artist. Allan was one of my teachers at CalArts, and a person that I coined the walking archive. The art world is the most complicit fabrication workshop for the compensatory dreams of financial elites who have nothing else to dream about but a ‘subjectivity’ they have successfully killed within themselves.” – Allan SekulaĪrtist, writer, and teacher, Allan Sekula, passed away last night. It is, among other things, the illuminated luxury-goods tip of the commodity iceberg. “The ‘art world’ is a small sector of culture in general, but an important one. Photo courtesy of Brigitte Bitomsky (2013).
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