Abstract: 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.
Speaker biography: 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.
