Top 8 Quotes & Sayings by Allan Sekula

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Allan Sekula.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic. From 1985 until his death in 2013, he taught at California Institute of the Arts. His work frequently focused on large economic systems, or "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."

American - Photographer | January 15, 1951 - August 10, 2013

Source: Wikipedia

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

Allan Sekula

Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.

Allan Sekula

The making of a human likeness on film is a political act.

Allan Sekula

The only objective truth that photographs offer is the assertion that somebody or something... was somewhere and took a picture.

Allan Sekula

Photography promises an enhanced mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy.

Allan Sekula

Documentary photography has amassed mountains of evidence. And yet... the genre has simultaneously contributed much to spectacle, to retinal excitation, to voyeurism, to terror, envy and nostalgia, and only a little to the critical understanding of the social world.

Allan Sekula

Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That's why insurance companies use them.

Allan Sekula

The photograph is an incomplete utterance, a message that depends on some external matrix of conditions and presuppositions for its readability.

Allan Sekula