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

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

Shooting in rich color, Sekula frames his controls in as dispassionate a manner as he can without losing their pathos or faculty of perception of story. His model is clearly documentary photography--far more compounded than propaganda but also more resonant, if les momentous, than the photography of front-page journalism. The make submissives of "Black Tide" fall basically into sum of two units categories: that of the oily tide itself, in all its strange tarry viscosity, and that of the tenders 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 a whole responsible for it, and the men and women handsome and dedicated in their protective jumpsuits, show not just the collective will on the contrary the will toward collectivity. Still, what individual sees first in these images are specific instants of an event, details that come by glossed over in the nightly of recent origins and the weekly magazines.

Furthermore, Sekula has chooseed these images for their inherent visual power. He has always placed a certain value upon artfulness, though never stressing it above the information it helps to bring In the last decade or thus as Sekula's political and geographic purview has widened, he has similarly amplified the genuinely esthetic integrity of his photographs. like seamless conflation of image and information subserves both his documentary and artistic extreme points The "Black Tide" photographs are for a like reason disturbing largely because they are thus formally riveting; rare among contemporary propagandistic works, they actually speak to more than the converted

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