Allan Sekula was an American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist, critic, and professor. He was born in 1951 in Erie, Pennsylvania, of Polish and English descent. His family moved to San Pedro, California in the early 1960s. He graduated with his MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1974, after having obtained his BA in biology from the same institution. He served on the faculty of the Photography and Media Program at the California Institute of the Arts from 1985 until his death on August 10, 2013, following a long struggle with gastric-esophageal cancer.
He began making art in the early 1970s, staging performances, building installations, and producing photo series. Sekula practiced what he called "critical realism," informed by Marxist thought, documentary photography, and conceptual art. Sekula's principal medium was photography, which he employed to create exhibitions, books, and films. His secondary medium was the written word, employing essays and other critical texts in concert with images to create a multi-level critique of contemporary late capitalism. His works make critical contributions on questions of social reality and globalization, and focus on what he described as "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world."
