Allan Sekula at Christopher Grimes - Santa Monica … political intent infuses the photographer's work

Allan Sekula's most recent series of photographs, collectively titled "Black Tide," documents the struggle last year along the northern Spanish (i.e., Galician) coast against one of the worst oil spills in history. The photographs brim with political implications, indicting Spain's current rightist government for its complacency while lauding the volunteers who endeavored mightily to clean the shoreline and save its fauna. Sekula might thus seem to be updating the histrionics we associate with traditional propaganda. Indeed over the 30 years his career has spanned, Sekula has refined his visual language into a potent and subtle vehicle for getting his Marxist analysis across. His messages, and his means, are a lot less crude than the stuff his heroes struggle with here.

Shooting in rich color, Sekula frames his subjects in as dispassionate a manner as he can without losing their pathos or sense of story. His model is clearly documentary photography--far more complex than propaganda but also more resonant, if less momentous, than the photography of front-page journalism. The subjects of "Black Tide" fall basically into two categories: that of the oily tide itself, in all its grotesque, tarry viscosity, and that of the volunteers, caught in moments of intense concentration, anxiety, exhaustion and, sometimes, lighter distraction. Of course, the oil functions synecdochically as the embodiment of the wastefully consumptive system responsible for it, and the men and women, handsome and dedicated in their protective jumpsuits, represent not just the collective will but the will toward collectivity. Still, what one sees first in these images are specific moments of an event, details that get glossed over in the nightly news and the weekly magazines.

Furthermore, Sekula has selected these images for their inherent visual power. He has always placed a certain value on artfulness, though never stressing it over the information it helps to convey. In the last decade or so, as Sekula's political and geographic purview has widened, he has similarly amplified the purely esthetic integrity of his photographs. Such seamless conflation of image and information serves both his documentary and artistic ends. The "Black Tide" photographs are so disturbing largely because they are so formally riveting; rare among contemporary propagandistic works, they actually speak to more than the converted.

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