#mark sealy

Mark Sealy’s work is in the curatorial sector of photography. His main interest lies within the agency, he told is that the relationships we develop as young photographers now and in the future will help aid and define our careers. He told us hotography is about occupying a position this is something that reminded me of Dave (one of my lecturers) as he often tells us it is important to have an “attitude” to what we photograph. 

“If not documentary then what?” - Mark Sealy

Mark has a reverence for the idea of telling stories, this is an important aspect to think about when doing documentary photography and relates heavily to the idea of having an attitude. It is important for us to remember, as photographers, how present and relevant bias is in our documentary images - are we telling a story from our viewpoint, completely analytically, or creating propaganda?

He told us that historically there has been a formulaic way of conducting documentary photography. It is important to question whether this is problematic or not, does it make images easier to compare over the years? Or instead does it diminish the changes between eras if the style of photography remains the same? 

Another thing he told introduced to us was the idea that violence is a large part of documentary photography - is it more important to help the situation or to capture the moment? This question is one that is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s questions about how present one can be in a scene to successfully document it. If we get involved in the scene not only do we have bias but we are also interfering with what was once an authentic moment. On the other hand it is important to note the issue of values the photographer might struggle with by doing nothing. 

Something that Mark mentioned was his reverence for Jimmy Goldberg and his ability to articulate the situations in the Congo and those in the Ukraine. 

Mark’s lecture was one that opened my eyes to many questions in photography that I wasn't totally aware of previously. It is interesting to think about how documentary photography has evolved and how it might change in the future. 

The Director of Autograph Mark Sealy's contribution to The Photographer's Playbook: 307 Assignments and Ideas

Mark Sealy, director of Autograph, on photography in Africa, speaking at Format 2011 Conference.

Questioning the validity of the European perspective on African photography, and rejecting it as a Conservative curatorial view which frames the work within an all-encompassing and distinction-less ‘African’ class, Mark Sealy called for a re-examining of African photography. He advocates paying close attention to the meaning of what is inside the image, and dismisses the term ‘African’ itself as too broad and misrepresentative of the different identities present in Africa.

The anecdote of the fight over ownership of Seydou Keita's work is evidence of the lingering post-colonial feel present in the readings of African imagery: shown in New York in 1991 as an “unknown photographer”, by 2001 he had become one of the most celebrated and sought-after African photographers, but the reading of the work, which documents Bamakois society both inside and outside the studio, remains simplistic, and the focus is on acquisition of the pieces, rather than on decoding the work itself. This, he says, is due to the fact that there is no curatorial field within which the work can be discussed, and instead, simplistic readings are made through the filter of cultural clichés, which in turn means that the only images to emerge are the ones that ‘we’ can readily understand. The images need to be decoded and interpreted indigenously, and this is a field that is only beginning to emerge today.

Referring to the early twentieth century work of DuBois, whose work aimed to show the humanity of the African subject, Sealy asked whether photography was enough to relieve the prejudice implied in our perception of ‘Africa’; indeed, he points at ‘Revue Noire’ continuing to show a “particularly romantic view of the work being produced on the African continent”, which is content to display works without examining or interrogating the images. In fact, when the question of ‘African’ work comes up, the only commonality is the term ‘African’ – an “imagined space” that very few of us understand. This attitude means that “work is being suffocated as it is being produced”. However, Sealy notes a number of emerging artists whose works make an attempt at escaping these constraints.