Art News

Allan Sekula’s photographic and filmic mappings of modern life at Stills in Edinburgh

EDINBURGH.- Stills’ Social Documents programme continues with Allan Sekula’s photographic and filmic mappings of modern life. Whether documenting labour conditions, the material flow of goods or protest movements, economic themes have dominated Sekula’s work since the early 1970s. Informed by both conceptual art and the history of social documentary photography his ‘critical realist’ approach brings together text and images to examine the complex social realities produced by the globalisation of economic structures. In 1995 Tramway presented Sekula’s epic photographic installation Fish Story which explored the worlds of seafaring, ports and harbours in the era of advanced capitalism. For Stills he returns once again to the subject of maritime space to present his recent series of photographs Ship of Fools alongside his award-winning documentary film The Forgotten Space. Together, they examine the sea as a space of trade, wor