The excerpt of Allan Sekula’s “The Archive and the Body” essay in the book directed me in search of more information on Allan Sekula as an artist and on the essay in it’s entirety. I did find a copy of the entire essay online and in the first paragraph Sekula writes, “...photography is not the harbinger of modernity, for the world is already modernizing. Rather, photography is modernity run riot. But danger resides not only in the numerical proliferation of images. There is also a premature fantasy of the triumph of a mass culture, a fantasy that reverberates with political foreboding, especially in the context of the militant democratic challenge posed by Chartism in 1839. Photography promises an enchanted mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy, an incendiary leveling of the existing cultural order.”

Sekula’s themes as an artist deals with conditions and injustice in working society.

For me, the section above not included in the book and knowing what type of theme Sekula’s art focuses on helped fill out a bit more the context of the section Inscriptions.

The need to document, classify, and have social regulation by means of photographs creates meaning through the archive.

And then there’s that death drive....