Allan Sekula: Forgetting Reagan

Schwartz investigates the American stories that shaped Sekula's documentary and his attraction to the writing of Twain and Herman Melville, the narrators of America's Civil War. Situating Sekula's work within a national history of war and modernism, War Prayers also considers why stories like its own have yet to be told.

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In the early 1970s, Allan Sekula began telling stories. In his 'novel' about labour relations in a greasy spoon restaurant, This
Ain't China: A Photonovel (1974), as well as his libretto for an opera about ecological disaster, Black Tide: Fragments for an
Opera (2002/2003), he recounted, in photographs and words, tales of capitalism's destructive logic. Telling stories that have
already been told, these works are hardly or not simply corrective. They interrogate the need for narrative, and ask us to pay
attention to what Sekula once referred to as the 'how' of history: how history is written for and by its 'victors'. In this book,
Dr Stephanie Schwartz considers Sekula's proclivity for teasing out the narrative structures of western culture by turning to
his prayer: Prayer for the Americans (I) (1994-2004). A nod to 'The War Prayer' of America's favourite humourist, Mark Twain,
Sekula's slide sequence interrogates the particular intersection of war and prayer in America, attending to the perverse logic
of the founding of an 'empire of right'. A book about war stories, War Prayers mines the narrative structure of Sekula's prayer
in order to tell a story about Sekula's work that has not been told, one that has been overshadowed by the need to tell of
his investment in capital's global logic. Schwartz investigates the American stories that shaped Sekula's documentary and his
attraction to the writing of Twain and Herman Melville, the narrators of America's Civil War. Situating Sekula's work within a
national history of war and modernism, War Prayers also considers why stories like its own have yet to be told.