Abstract

The guest editors introduce a special issue on the dual legacy of Allan Sekula (1951–2013), who advanced the social, material history of photography as a writer and critic and who helped reinvent documentary forms in the wake of conceptual art as a photographer and artist. In addition to examining key works in Sekula’s oeuvre, the issue focuses on two major issues raised by Sekula’s writing and artistic practice: the contested status of photographs as documents, and therefore the nature and legacy of documentary and realist cultural practices; and how what Sekula called “the traffic in photographs,” in its global reach, raises again the question of the human and humanism.