Long out of print, this seminal collection of essays and photographs are by artist, theorist and filmmaker, Allan Sekula. Originally published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1984, in these essays and images Sekula sought to portray the inextricable bond between labour and material culture, drawing deeply on Marxist theory to argue passionately for a collective model of progress.

Sekula taught at California Institute of Arts (CalArts) from 1985 until his death in 2013, and from that insider’s position he critiqued photography and the circumstances of its production and consumption, exposing what the medium failed to represent—women, labourers, minorities and the institutional structures that reinforce cultural biases.

“A sense of art history is part of the critical basis on which artists construct ‘a future’ of art. But the question is, which sense of art history will be shaping that future? Art history has always been far too important to be simply left up to art historians.”
— Ian Burn, 1985

This presentation is organised by Robert Milne and includes a work by Ian Burn from 1989, exhibited with selected publications and other documentation, to coincide with the release of the new book. The Estate of Ian Burn is represented by Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-Conceptual artist’. This volume brings together a diverse collection of Burn’s writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting. The publication includes previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Burn called ‘peripheral vision’.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition, Allan Sekula: Dismal science, photoworks, 1972-1996 at the Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam. With texts from Allan Sekula and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

Allan Sekula was one of the most important figures in modern photography of the second half of the twentieth century. His work focused on a critique of the links that photography has always maintained with the economy, work and the politics of representation. From his beginnings in the seventies, Sekula became a reference by incorporating textuality into photography in a way that had been previously denied it by modern art. His book Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (1984), a key work of the new photographic discourse of the late twentieth century, enshrined him as one of the least orthodox historians of the medium.

In mines and ports across the world, human labor sustains our industrial and globalized economies. Allan Sekula imagined and set out to realize an artwork, The Dockers’ Museum, which makes the struggles of miners, dockworkers, and seafarers visible through networks of metonymic objects that embody these workers’ imaginaries. The collaborative notes gathered in this publication accompany the presentation of the Mining Section (Bureau des mines) of The Dockers’ Museum at the Anatomical Theater in Leuven in the Fall of 2016.