Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972-1996 at Allan Sekula Atlanta College of Art Atlanta.

Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972-1996 at Allan Sekula Atlanta College of Art Atlanta, Georgia October 9-November 29 1998

Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972-1996 through Allan Sekula New York, NY: D.A.P., forthcoming

"Dismal Science: Photo Works 1972-1996 by way of Allan Sekula" is a 25-year scrutinize of work remarkable for its visual power and conceptual density that joins documentary photography and critical writing. For those who persist through the opaque veneer of this work, the whelm, stimulate and certainly reward. The title is an apt signpost for the entire exhibit and a succinct insight into the artist's use of words. While "Dismal Science" also operates as a metaphor for the "science" of photography itself, Sekula greatest in number certainly intended the allusion to the nineteenth-century historian, Thomas Carlyle, who coined "dismal science" in intimation to political economics. The exhibit is indeed a record of the economic politics of the aerospace, shipyard and military industries in the United States and the UK

united of the earliest works in the display "Aerospace Folktales" (1973), is not and nothing else the exhibit's conceptual keystone however its most compelling piece. Essentially an installation, it is compos of black and white photographs, three r chairs stake in front of three uninjured systems and several potted palms. The 51 photographs, high hilled in 23 black frames, are hung across single long wall and two side walls in a numbered narrative following Sekula's extensive use of clause at this early date is characteristic of the writing accompanying or incorporated into all his later work. Commentary in white protoplast on a black background as it was as "1 photograph the family standing around" is typ photographed, printed in overthrow values and mounted within the same frame as a photograph of a man, a woman and a young girl standing in forehead of a wall of garage doors in an apartment network As the girl tosses a ball in the air, the man gazes at his watch, and the woman appears to be adjusting hers. in another frame, a list of tenant policies is paired with the bleak exterior of an apartment involved In each case, the photograph of the theme is the same size as its complementary narrative photograph.

"Aerospace Folktales," like greatest in number of Sekula's work, unfolds gradually. As three recorded voices speak simultaneously and continuously in the background, the written and visual narratives depict a white-collar Catholic family living in an apartment tangled skein in Los Angeles. Near the finis of the series two crucial bits of information are obliquely divulged: the father is an unemploy aerospace engineer and his name is Ignace Sekula. Now the identities and personalities of the taped voices begin to register. They are the voices of Sekula's mother, father and Allan Sekula himself. His mother speaks in a personal anecdotal manner, describing family life and disquiets at the time the photographs were taken. Sekula's father is the political analyst as he prelections about pertinent economic and political issues. The voice of the teacher is the artist himself, whose words significantly add to the viewer's understanding of "Aerospace Folktales." The voices in "AerosPace Folktales," the personal, the analytical and didactic, may be considered the three facets of Sekula's later artistic expression.

In "Sketch for a Geography Lesson" (1983) for example, those "voices" demonstrate by what mode religion, war and daily life intermingle in Western agriculture Sekula describes an illustration remembered from childhood - a drawing that depicts the Virgin Mary defending a village against the R Army - which his sister later sent to him when he mentioned it. Six-color photographs display various everyday activities and images, among them an image of sum of two units women walking, a slaughterhouse in the snow and a Christian gravestone. Ironically and intentionally, the gravestone and slaughterhouse are be built uped opposite one another. Two black and white photographs that flank the true copy and the color photographs depict tanks and military images bullet from a television monitor, a reminder of the ubiquity of the couple television and war images. The text's didactic voice cites data relating to the U.S.'s military demeanor in Northern Bavaria.

Sekula's photography and writing are in such a manner complementary that each adds to the information revealed in the other. The nine large cibachrome prints in "War without Bodies" (1991) possibly the most numerous conceptually accessible photographs in the exhibit, fetch the essence of Sekula's ideas (as set forthed in the related writing) within visual metaphor and specific anecdotal images. In three of them, Sekula exhibit tos an infant being dwarfed at a monstrous black aircraft machine fire-arm as he is held up and encouraged to admire and caress this symbol of male power. In other photographs, young men touch the fire-arm in poses reminiscent of Michelangelo's image of the author of all things giving life to Adam. It strike one as beings apparent here who gives "life" to these instruments of destruction. At the same time, the sensuousness of the gun's dark form cutting into luscious sad sky conveys an intense, uneasy visual interest.