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Meditations on a Triptych, 1973-1978, is an important work for several reasons. It is an early example of artists’ recent tendency to incorporate text with photographs, a method that became increasingly widespread during the 1970s, and it appropriates snapshot images of no intrinsic visual or associative interest for artistic (though not aesthetic) ends. It also anticipates the major themes of Sekula’s important 1974 essay On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, published in 1975, which had a profound effect on contemporary photographic theory and practice.

Three, enlarged, “found” snapshots are presented on the wall. In the work’s current form, a printed essay of about 3,500 words accompanies the photographs, proposing various, slightly shifting interpretations. Analytical in style and subversively political in content, it shares with the photographs a poignancy that comes of its deadpan telling of a yearning for significance:

The woman is wearing a red dress. Her mouth is painted with the same red. A century ago this red might have been reserved for a flamboyant eroticism. The red of the courtesan. The red target of male desire. Now this red enters the space of married life. Department stores broadcast a certain poetry of desire. Commodities take on mysterious properties. (It’s a marketing strategy, an outcome of “motivational research,” that governs the orchestration of this red.)

While the photographs used for Meditations have stayed the same, the text was developed over a five-year period as the piece was shown in a variety of situations. It was originally audiotaped, the sound presented with the photographs, for the work’s debut in a small gallery at California Institute of the Arts. The printed version, Sekula says, was modified several times before it reached its current form, but the basic structure of alternative readings and the primary underlying argument—that the meaning of any photograph is dependent on an array of social inventions—has existed since 1973. The original text no longer exists.¹

That the pictures represent members of Sekula’s own family, that he made the two on the left as a child, is not revealed in the text. This biographical note, irrelevant on one level, does demonstrate the photograph’s fickle relationship to fact: we will read the text differently with this knowledge.

1. Alan Sekula, telephone interviews with the author, 15 May 1992 and 18 May 1992. ↩︎