Allan Sekula

In “Polonia and Other Fables,” photographer Allan Sekula documents Polonia, the diasporic zone of expatriated Poles—an “imagined community,” in Sekula’s words—in which he immersed himself during the past three years. The forty pictures in the exhibition, a joint commission of Chicago’s Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, plumb the links between the two cities—migration, hibernal light, hardscrabble working-class conditions—through a mosaic of fragments.

“Polonia” finds Sekula modulating fluidly between street photography, aerial surveillance, and hagiographic portraiture, his subjects linked by his ethnographic sensibility and a centrifugally propelled cloud of association. Although its style is ostensibly documentary, the exhibition has the feel of an imperfect archive, the pictures that of extant evidence of a rapidly shifting place. Diaspora is territory that has been aggressively intellectualized in the past decade, but it is presented here as memories at once lucid and surreal.

Hence instances of Sekula’s now-familiar concerns: post-Soviet landscapes updated in flimsy Western dress, pig farmers displaced by industrial agriculture, and ominous military installations cropping up throughout New Europe. These more global issues are tempered, however, with hints of the autobiographical—Sekula’s father holding a list of names alluding to the family’s contested Catholic and Jewish heritage—and the local, in pictures of Latino workers in Chicago marching on May Day or a middle-aged black woman warily smoking. These sorts of pictures push Sekula’s cartography to its extremes but also render his ideologically rich survey both poetic and grounded.