Allan Sekula: Forgetting Reagan

In the early 1970s, Allan Sekula began telling stories. In his 'novel' about labour relations in a greasy spoon restaurant, ThisAin't China: A Photonovel (1974), as well as his libretto for an opera about ecological disaster, Black Tide: Fragments for anOpera (2002/2003), he recounted, in photographs and words, tales of capitalism's destructive logic. Telling stories that havealready been told, these works are hardly or not simply corrective. They interrogate the need for narrative, and ask us to payattention 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 tohis 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 logicof the founding of an 'empire of right'. A book about war stories, War Prayers mines the narrative structure of Sekula's prayerin order to tell a story about Sekula's work that has not been told, one that has been overshadowed by the need to tell ofhis investment in capital's global logic. Schwartz investigates the American stories that shaped Sekula's documentary and hisattraction to the writing of Twain and Herman Melville, the narrators of America's Civil War. Situating Sekula's work within anational history of war and modernism, War Prayers also considers why stories like its own have yet to be told.