Allan Sekula’s “Photography Against the Grain”: The Archive and Politics of Documentary
An image-text laboratory: testing a “critical realism” that could connect with social movements and the conditions of the working class.
American artist and critic Allan Sekula wrote and photographed the pieces for Photography Against the Grain between 1973 and 1983, publishing the collection in 1984. The book integrates essays and photo-works into the same framework, directly confronting the politics of “documentary,” the visualization of labor and capital, and the image as social practice. It is considered a key text in rewriting the documentary tradition from a Marxist standpoint, opening up the “politics of the archive” and “critical photography.”
Core Concepts: The Politics of Documentary, Archive, and Labor
Sekula’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. Rewriting Documentary: From Aesthetic Genre to Political Practice
In essays like “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary,” Sekula argues for rescuing documentary from “formal autonomy” and “art-historical style” and returning it to a “cartography of social relations.” Documentary is not a mere aesthetic type, but a matter of position, testimony, and alliance: For whom are you speaking? Who is included or excluded? How do sequence and text guide the reading? Conclusion: Documentary is a mode of writing in struggle.
2. Labor / Capital / Archive: How Photos Are Used by Institutions
In “Photography Between Labor and Capital,” he tracks the different uses of images in corporate archives, union publications, and news media. The same factory photo, with different captions and layouts, can serve managerial surveillance, propaganda, or mobilization. From this, Sekula develops the “politics of the archive”: who preserves, how it’s cataloged, and who interprets it determines the image’s meaning and power.
3. Visualizing the Global Economy: Ports, Logistics, and Transnational Chains
Sekula aims his lens at harbors, docks, warehouses, containers, and borders, translating the seemingly impersonal system of maritime trade into a readable social landscape: the division of labor, mechanical rhythms, the flow of goods, and class status are all interconnected in the details. This thread laid the groundwork for his later, larger narratives on shipping and globalization.
4. The Politics of Text-Image-Layout
For Sekula, a “good photograph” is not victorious on its own; it generates critical judgment through titles, captions, long-form text, and sequencing. He incorporates critical writing into the body of the artwork itself: writing is a tool for organizing reality. The public efficacy of photography depends on its insertion into a chain of argument and evidence.
Value and Impact: As Critical Toolkit and Archival Turn
The enduring value of Photography Against the Grain can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: The book provides a ready-to-use critical toolkit: (a) Redefining documentary by position and relation; (b) Using “archive politics” to question an image’s institutional life; (c) Treating sequences/captions/essays as meaning-generating mechanisms; (d) Reading seemingly neutral spaces (ports, borders) from a labor perspective.
- Long-Term Impact: Sekula’s work influenced the documentary revival of the late 1980s and the “archive-evidence” turn in curating and art. It is homologous with John Tagg’s research on the state and the archive, and it cleared a path for Martha Rosler’s critique of documentary and later visual studies of global logistics.
Photography Against the Grain teaches us that to read a documentary image, we must look not only at the picture, but at how it is placed in an archive, annotated by whom, whom it serves, and with whom it can form an alliance.
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