Event details
Oct
28
Amphibious Realities / Allan Sekula event
Join the Department of Comparative Literature for a public presentation and conversation with Gail Day and Steve Edwards on their recently published book Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula (Verso, 2025), the first monograph on Allan Sekula (1951–2013), the award-winning anti-capitalist artist, photographer, filmmaker, and theorist. Amphibious Realities was named a Library Journal Best Book of 2025.
Combining images and essays, Sekula’s work examined “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world,” with particular attention to documentary form, labor, globalization, maritime space, and what Day and Edwards describe as terraqueous capitalism. Amphibious Realities offers an overarching analysis of Sekula’s “documentary poetics,” tracing the relation between radical documentary, allegorical reading, uneven and combined development, and the dialectics of form. In their presentation, Day and Edwards will introduce the intellectual project of Amphibious Realities before turning to their analysis of Waiting for Tear Gas (1999–2000), Sekula’s slide cycle documenting the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The conversation will place Sekula’s work in relation to photography, film, realism, political aesthetics, and the visual culture of global capitalism.
The event will also feature Sally Stein, Professor Emerita at UC Irvine and director of the Allan Sekula Studio, in conversation with the authors and Princeton faculty.
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 Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press, 2011) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. She was the 2025–2026 Pilkington Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester.
Steve Edwards is Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has previously held chairs at the Open University and at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006), Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006), and Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012). His next book is Daguerreotypes: Patents, Persons, and Property in Britain, 1840–1855.
Gail Day and Steve Edwards co-authored Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula and have worked together on other essays. They are longstanding members of the research collective convening the Marxism in Culture seminar at the University of London.
Combining images and essays, Sekula’s work examined “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world,” with particular attention to documentary form, labor, globalization, maritime space, and what Day and Edwards describe as terraqueous capitalism. Amphibious Realities offers an overarching analysis of Sekula’s “documentary poetics,” tracing the relation between radical documentary, allegorical reading, uneven and combined development, and the dialectics of form. In their presentation, Day and Edwards will introduce the intellectual project of Amphibious Realities before turning to their analysis of Waiting for Tear Gas (1999–2000), Sekula’s slide cycle documenting the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. The conversation will place Sekula’s work in relation to photography, film, realism, political aesthetics, and the visual culture of global capitalism.
The event will also feature Sally Stein, Professor Emerita at UC Irvine and director of the Allan Sekula Studio, in conversation with the authors and Princeton faculty.
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 Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press, 2011) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. She was the 2025–2026 Pilkington Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester.
Steve Edwards is Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has previously held chairs at the Open University and at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006), Photography: A Very Short Introduction (2006), and Martha Rosler: The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012). His next book is Daguerreotypes: Patents, Persons, and Property in Britain, 1840–1855.
Gail Day and Steve Edwards co-authored Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula and have worked together on other essays. They are longstanding members of the research collective convening the Marxism in Culture seminar at the University of London.
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Date
October 28, 2026Time
5:00 p.m.Location
Architecture Building, N101 Betts AuditoriumAudience
University Sponsors
Department of German / Film Studies