Understand meaning

Allan Sekula. Koreatown, Los Angeles. Da série Fish Story, Chapter One. 1992

For Sekula, a ‘critical representational art … that points openly to the social world and to possibilities of social transformation’ remains the only art worthy of an oppositional politics, as well as a necessary counter to a situation in which ‘the old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie’. In other words, to understand the notion of the play of signifiers as licensing some absolute elasticity of signification is no less false than a belief in photography’s total and transparent objectivity. The task is, rather, to insist on the historical, social and institutional inscription of photographic meaning, of the place of photographs within different discourses and image regimes; in short, to understand meaning as delimited within changeable and overlapping contexts.