Images as History Seminar: A Letter to Laos: Allan Sekula’s Postscript
A seminar series on photography and history in the Americas
Images as History Seminar: A Letter to Laos: Allan Sekula’s Postscript
15 May 2025, 18:00 – 20:00
* Please note, the location of the seminar has change to room 105 (instead of room 103) 51 Gordon Square*
A seminar series on photography and history in the Americas.
In this talk, Dr Stephanie Schwartz, Associate Professor of American Art at UCL, will be presenting a paper drawn from material in her forthcoming book on the American photographer Allan Sekula. Taking Sekula’s A Short Film for Laos (2006) as a frame, she considers the artist’s long-held engagement with war, and particularly his interest in Southeast Asia. She attends to the narrative forms—from the letter to the essay and the folktale—framing Sekula’s war work in the hopes of elucidating what his continued interrogation of the excessive violence of the imperial conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s tells us about the work and the time of war.
Dr Stephanie Schwartz is Associate Professor of American Art in the Department of History of Art at University College London. In 2023, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Grant for her ongoing research on film and fascism in the US in the 1930s and 1940s. Stephanie’s writing on photography and film has appeared in October, Oxford Art Journal and ARTMargins. She is the author of Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020) and the editor of the Tate Modern In Focus project on Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas (2016). Stephanie is currently completing Allan Sekula’s War Work for MACK Book’s Discourse series.
In 2023, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for ‘The Native and the National: Film and Fascism in the Era of the New Deal’, a study of the work of the international anti-fascist film collective Frontier Films.
Further information
Ticketing
Ticketed and Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Yes
Other events in this series
Images as History Seminar Series: Form as Authority in the Photobooks of Helen Levitt
Dr Kimberly Schreiber, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, hosts the first in a series of seminars on photography and history in the Americas.
Images as History Seminar Series: Africa in the US Cold War Photographic Archive
Dr Kimberly Schreiber, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, hosts the second seminar of the series on photography and history in the Americas.
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