Editors' Introduction: Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs

Abstract

In 1975 Allan Sekula published in Artforum a series of essays on the history of photography that responded critically to the emerging art photography boom of the 1970s and 1980s.1 Addressing key figures such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen in the developing canon of art photography—specifically as it was being formulated at the Museum of Modern Art—Sekula examined the way the selective construction of a modernist aesthetic tradition in photography served to legitimate the medium as a fine art, thereby securing its entry into the market and the museum. In his writing over the following decade, Sekula continually pointed out the exclusions on which this canon and its formalist criteria for entry were based, opening the charmed circle of modernist auteurs to a comparative analysis with other photographic modes: the aerial view in military photography, corporate advertising, paparazzi celebrity photography, commercial portraiture, industrial photography, police photography, and, crucially, documentary photography. The introduction to Sekula’s first book of collected essays, Photography against the Grain, summarizes this project as “a materialist social history of photography, a history that takes the interplay of economic and technological considerations into account.”2 Sekula argued for a history of what he called “the traffic in photographs,” which denotes not just the material and discursive networks in and through which photographs are produced, circulated, and received, but also “the incessant oscillation between . . . the ‘antinomies of bourgeois thought’” that structures such circulation, especially between science and art, instrumental images and aesthetic ones, and realism and formalism.3 This form of history writing played a central role in the so-called photography debates of the 1980s and involved practitioners, critics, and historians such as Victor Burgin, Steve Edwards, Molly Nesbit, Martha Rosler, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Sally Stein, and John Tagg.4 And the effort met stiff resistance, to some even threatening the very existence of art (or photography-as-art) itself. In an early skirmish in what became the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Hilton Kramer misconstrued Sekula’s essay on Steichen as “a bitter attack . . .