Extent:

7.48 Linear Feet (17 boxes)

Scope and content:

Sekula's rich visual sense is evident in the 142 notebooks comprising Series I. Dating from 1970, while he was still a student, to 2012, the notebooks chronicle Sekula's life and development as an artist and theorist, and demonstrate his artistic process from the initial formulation of projects to sketched shot frames for his films. Written in a clear, meticulous script and richly illustrated with drawings and sketches, they provide a remarkably complete look into the conceptualization and development of most of Sekula's major projects and writings. The notebooks also contain occasional observations on Sekula's personal and professional life, comments on exhibition projects, and thoughts about what he was reading and looking at. Individual notebooks are also devoted to research and notes for Sekula's seminal writings, bibliographies, and teaching notes. Scattered among his notes are anecdotes, quotations, over 1,700 illustrations, and inserted or pasted-in research materials.

Sekula's student notebooks contain numerous sketches and plans for conceptual artworks, many of which were unrealized. In the School is a Factory notebook (NB023), kept during his early teaching career at Orange Coast Community College between 1976 and 1979, Sekula argues against the institutionalization of inequality promulgated through the learning structures of colleges and universities. As Sekula's career led him to travel widely and frequently, the notebooks served as travel journals. Yet while many notebooks feature sketches of people and meals in airports, the bulk of their content is devoted to Sekula's exploration of labor inequality and injustice within the structures of the global capitalist industrial complex. Among the projects developed in his notebooks Sekula looks, for example, at the price of mining for Canadian Notes (1989; three notebooks); the exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalization in Fish Story (1995; nine notebooks); and the shipping industry, Forgotten Space, (2010; eight notebooks).

The notebooks are of varying sizes and brands, seemingly acquired as Sekula needed them. Most of the notebooks were titled and dated by Sekula. Titles in brackets represent titles that were devised by the archivist for untitled notebooks. Sekula's home address is written inside their front covers, and Sekula even indicated reward money for the return of a lost notebook. Notebook numbers assigned by Sekula's assistant are found at the beginning of each notebook's Scope & Contents note.

Stylistically speaking, the notebooks fall into two groups. Notebooks from the 1970s to the early 2000s are executed in a monochromatic style. Sekula used black or blue pen and sometimes pencil in texts and illustrations. Around 2009, his notebooks take on a more colorful aesthetic. NB109 (Forgotten Space and Polonia and Other Fables) and NB127 (Mexico/Barcelona), for example, almost exclusively contain sketches in colored pen and neon highlighter which often spill onto the adjacent pages.

Processing information:

This series was processed by Emmabeth Nanol.

Arrangement:

Arranged chronologically.

Contents

Access and use