Stephanie Schwartz - A Postscript: Allan Sekula and the Work of War

You are invited to a talk and Q&A with Dr Stephanie Schwartz, who will present a paper based on her book forthcoming with MACK books on the ‘war work’ of the late artist-photographer Allan Sekula. 

We are pleased to announce Dr Stephanie Schwartz, Associate Professor of American Art at UCL, will be coming to Leeds to present a paper drawing on the themes and material of her forthcoming book.

In 2006, Allan Sekula wrote a short letter to Laos. Drafted in his notebook and never sent, the letter apologizes, sort of, for Operation Barrel Roll, the covert US-led bombing campaign designed to block the Viet Cong’s access to their main supply route, the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Over the course of almost a decade, from December 1964 to March 1973, the US military dropped more than two million tons of bombs of the country.

In this talk, Stephanie Schwartz takes Sekula’s letter as a starting point for a consideration of the artist’s long-held engagement with the wars in Southeast Asia and his A Short Film for Laos (2006). She attends to the narrative forms—from the letter to the essay and the folktale—framing Sekula’s war work in the hopes of elucidating what his continued interrogation of the excessive violence of the imperial conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s tells us about the work of war. With Sekula’s film in mind, we are tasked, Schwartz argues, to interrogate the time of war, to ask how wars come to be scripted as singular and continuous, or simply happening again.” 

The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

Light refreshments provided.

Part of the Critical Materialism Seminar Series, organised by Jack Rondeau (School of English) and Owen Atkinson (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies), funded by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures.

About the speaker

Dr Stephanie Schwartz is Associate Professor of American Art in the Department of History of Art at University College London. In 2023, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Grant for her ongoing research on film and fascism in the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Stephanie’s writing on photography and film has appeared in October, Oxford Art Journal and ARTMargins. She is the author of Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020) and the editor of the Tate Modern In Focus project on Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas (2016). Stephanie is currently completing Allan Sekula’s War Work, a book about Sekula’s little-known preoccupation with Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ and the indivisibility between war and prayer in America.

More information

For further information, please email Owen Atkinson at O.Atkinson@leeds.ac.uk.

Image

Allan Sekula - Salty Dog Bites the Hand. Photo by AGCC Studio Artist Slobodan Dimitrov. License: CC BY-NC 2.0.