As I mentioned in an earlier post the University of Michigan recently had a History of Art Symposium on "Contemporary Strategies in Documentary Photography" part 1 and part 11 where the issue of image and text is raised.

One of the lectures in part is by Allan Sekula's exploration of what photography can accomplish by depicting social realitiesRealism in a Time of Lies. Sekula took up photography in the early 1970s. His formative influences included Marxist theory, documentary photography, and the Conceptual art movement of the late 1960s. One of his most important early works is Aerospace Folktales (1973).

In this work, which originally consisted of three separate narrative elements (photographs, a spoken sound track, and a written commentary), he documented the impact of unemployment in a working-class family.This project and the ones that followed exemplify Sekula's conception of "critical realism.

He says in the introduction to his book Photography Against the Grain (1984)

I wanted to construct works from within concrete life situations, situations within which there was either an overt or active clash of interests and representations. Any interest I had in artifice and constructed dialogue was part of a search for a certain “realism”, a realism not of appearances or social facts but of everyday experience and against the grip of advanced capitalism.

Traditional "concerned" documentary has been faulted for rendering human tragedy a personal failing outside the realm of politics, for substituting empathy in place of activism, compassion in place of struggle, and thus obscuring the political sphere where determinations, actions and instrumentalities are not in themselves visual.

Hence the idea of a critical realism. Monika Szewczyk describes this in relation to Sekula's This Ain't China:A Photonovel in
Negation Notes (while working on an exhibition with Allan Sekula featuring This Ain’t China: A Photonovel) in the e-flux journal.