Join us for a half-day symposium where scholars and artists present new scholarship and projects about the significance of Fish Story, and its importance for Allan Sekula's theories of critical documentary photography.
Please use this link to register for the event:
https://events.leapevents.com/event/10-31-sekula-fish-story-symposium
Schedule:
1:00 pm: Session One
Aesthetics, Logistics, Intelligence, and Collectivity: Some Embarkment Points to Fish Story
Benjamin J. Young, Clinical Assistant Professor, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University
The Fish in Fish Story: Oceanographic Margins of Allan Sekula’s Archive
Joe Riley, Assistant Professor of Art, Art Department, Division of Art, Reed College
2:15pm: Independent Exhibition Viewing
3:00pm: Session Two
Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story
Gail Day, Professor of Art History and Critical Theory, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
Presenters:
Gail Day and Steve Edwards co-authored Amphibious Realities: The Documentary Poetics of Allan Sekula (Verso, 2025) – a Library Journal Best Book of 2025. They have worked together on other essays. They are longstanding members of the research collective convening the Marxism in Culture seminar at the University of London.
Gail Day is Professor of Art History & Critical Theory in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press, 2011) was shortlisted for the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. She was the 2025-2026 Pilkington Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester.
Steve Edwards is Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has previously held chairs at the Open University and at Birkbeck, University of London. His publications include: The Making of English Photography, Allegories (2006); Photography: A Very Short Introduction(2006); Martha Rosler, The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (2012). His next book will be Daguerreotypes: Patents, Persons, and Property in Britain, 1840-1855. He is chair of the editorial group for Oxford Art Journal, a member of the editorial collective for the Historical Materialism book series (Brill/Haymarket).
Joe Riley is an interdisciplinary artist and environmental historian. Through research spanning the studio, laboratory, and archives, his recent projects critically examine the hydro-politics of knowledge, infrastructures, and the commodification of marine life. His collaborative works with Audrey Snyder and the collective Futurefarmers have been exhibited at venues including Getty Pacific Standard Time, Clockshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artes Mundi 7, and Sharjah Biennale 13. From 2020-2024, Joe was a participating artist, co-author, and co-curator of the Getty PST “Art & Science” Embodied Pacific initiative at UC San Diego. His forthcoming project, Research Vessel, visualizes marine environmental knowledge through the collective making and use of watercraft(s): vessels for critical thought and action.
Benjamin J. Young teaches Art History in the School of Art, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University. In addition to his publications on the work of Sekula, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, among others, he co-edited the special issue “Allan Sekula and the Traffic in Photographs” in Grey Room. He is editor of and contributor to the anthology Allan Sekula, forthcoming in the OCTOBER Files book series from MIT Press.
Please use this link to register for the event:
https://events.leapevents.com/event/10-31-sekula-fish-story-symposium
This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story, on view at the Wallach Art Gallery October 2 through December 20, 2026.
