Facing Photographic Acts (After Allan Sekula)

In this article, I pay tribute to Allan Sekula’s essay “The Body and the Archive” (1986), a canonical text in the bibliographies of the history of photography, and explores its parallel bearings on making art and teaching art history today. Following Sekula’s pioneering investigations into the early photographic mechanisms of surveillance, archiving, and social control, I analyze the creative practice of two contemporary camera artists, Tomoko Sawada and Shabtai Pinchevsky, and the various social concerns their works evoke. By very different procedures of responding to archives of photographic portraits, Sawada and Pinchevsky play with exploiting the modern machinations of the construction and distribution of racial stereotypes, thus allowing us to reconsider the historical cases and critical arguments brought by Sekula four decades ago; nonetheless, their creative stimulus stems from the inflection of prevalent camera-ruled anthropometrical technologies upon the artists themselves, along with their personal experience in their regular operation.