Book launch – Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula

Gail Day and Steve Edwards will discuss their new book on award-winning, anti-capitalist artist, photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951–2013).

Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula  by Gail Day and Steve Edwards was published by Verso in November 2025.

The book is an acute, overarching analysis of the work of Allan Sekula (1951–2013). Photographer, filmmaker, theorist and one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, Sekula is renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks.

Combining images and essays, Sekula’s work considered ‘the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world’ and examined its image modes, with a growing attention to terraqueous capitalism,

Amphibious Realities is an acute and overarching analysis of Sekula’s ‘documentary poetics’, showing how his project of radical documentary entwines allegorical reading with uneven and combined development. The book traces surprising paths through Sekula’s practice, posing new questions about the relations between aesthetics and politics, and delineating his dialectics of form. 

Amphibious Realities was shortlisted for the Library Journal Prize for Best Books of 2025.

All welcome. No booking required.

Book cover showing ‘Chief mate checking temperatures of refrigerated containers. Mid Atlantic.’ From Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1995).

About the speakers

Gail Day is Professor of Art History and Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her book Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Prize. Gail is also the Pilkington Visiting Professor for 2025/6 at the University of Manchester.

Steve Edwards is Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Research Centre at Courtauld Institute of Art. He is author of The Making of English Photography: Allegories; Photography: A Very Short Introduction; and Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems. He is an editor for the Historical Materialism book series and editorial chair for Oxford Art Journal.

Venue

Student Common Room
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University Road
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT

AccessAble guide to the building.

Feature image

Allan Sekula, 35mm transparency of ‘astronaut’ protestor, from 14-minute looped slide sequence Waiting for Tear Gas [white globe to black] (1999-2000). Courtesy of the Allan Sekula Studio.