Gail Day and Steve Edwards discuss their much-anticipated book on Allan Sekula

Seminar with Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Alex Fletcher and Stephanie Schwartz, discussing award-winning, anti-capitalist artist, photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951–2013).

Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula (Verso, 2025) is the first monograph on Allan Sekula (1951–2013), the award-winning, anti-capitalist artist, photographer, filmmaker, and theorist. 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 has been shortlisted for the Library Journal Prize for Best Books of 2025.

All welcome. No booking required.

The seminar is part of a Marxism in Culture seminar series, organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. The series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis.

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.

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.

Alex Fletcher is Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London. He teaches on the MA Performance: Screen and Mres Art: Theory and Philosophy. He is also an editor at the journal Philosophy of Photography and works as managing editor for Ibraaz Publishing.

Stephanie Schwartz is Associate Professor at UCL History of Art. Her research and teaching address photography and its histories, with a particular emphasis on American documentary. Stephanie is the author of Walker Evans: Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020) and the editor of "Modernism After Paul Strand", a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal (2015). She is currently writing a book on Allan Sekula's war work for MACK Books Discourse series.

Venue

Institute of Advanced Studies Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT

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.