Given its location in Chicago, the Renaissance Society was the perfect venue for Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables, forty photographs and accompanying texts three years in the making. The exhibition represented a joint commission between the Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. Polonia refers to Poles living outside their country, and Chicago is host to the largest population outside of Warsaw.

For centuries, Poland has been dominated by other nations, by the church, and, as this exhibition showed, by the interests of Western multi-national corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Polish identity perennially morphs and adjusts. It is this agon that Sekula captures in his images, and that he contextualizes so sharply in the related texts. His projects are always expressive history lessons (contemporary history, history as it is unfolding), and the viewer quickly came to realize that the Polish are at another crucial juncture now. The “fables” in question are the inherent and powerful myths of identity—cultural, national, and familial. But they also refer to the myths that inevitably accompany display and artmaking, something Sekula examines in all his projects.

Sekula is himself of Polish heritage, and family members appear in four photographs. The most striking of these is a photograph of his father reading names of relatives from a list. That two of these are rabbis—Sekula himself was raised as a Catholic—suggests one of the more dramatic transformations Poles have made in the modern era. Although Poland’s pre-World War II Jewish population was one of the largest in Europe, it is now a mere fraction of its previous number. But Sekula allows viewers to draw these connections for themselves. The autobiographical references that regularly appear in his work are documented with an admirably light touch, through intelligent inference rather than grandiose self-assertion.

Sekula (b. 1951) began seriously thinking about photography in 1968 as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, where he famously took classes with the social philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the conceptual artist John Baldessari. He is currently a faculty member in the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). His project is to critique, as he has said, “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.” Unique as a social critic, writer, and photographer, Sekula’s Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984) has long been an indispensable foray into the limits and possibilities of (documentary) photography. The projects leading up to Fish Story (1995), which dramatically documented world port cities, comprise some of the first iterations of globalism in the visual arts. No one has shown the sea at once so beautiful and so grimly realpolitik. In his writing and photography, Sekula has problematized photography to such an extent—his essay “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” (1975) is a foundational text—that he has created the space for his own art, which has become a signal example of the medium’s social responsibility. He is among the most important critical-documentary photographers working today.

Also on display here was a small viewing room with a repeating slide show of Sekula’s earlier Walking on Water (1990/1995; eighty slides shown in ten second intervals), which documents the changing nature of urban economies and the invidious effects of (U.S.) capitalism in post-Communist Poland. Here is the legacy of the Solidarity Movement and the end of communism. It is a cultural vacuum that has left Poland reeling under its most recent identity crisis. If some of the images now seem dated—the graffiti words “Sex Shop” spray-painted on eighteenth-century doorways, for instance—it is worth recalling that Walking on Water is already two decades old. In any case, the presence of Walking on Water here provided something of a prequel to the issues documented in Polonia. Thus, visitors familiar with Sekula’s work could discern an evolution in his photography. The images in Polonia are more immediate and observant, more concerned with figures and in the street’s spectacle. At the same time, though, they deal with a much broader historical context, and the very conditions of Polish identity. In this sense they are more ambitious, and perhaps wiser.

Sekula’s own accompanying texts, which are as important to his art as the photographs, were collected in a notebook available on tables for viewers to peruse. These texts are filled with notes, epigrams, quotations, polemics, and his otherwise discursive musings. On the one hand, they are playful bricolage, and on the other, unique observations about vast international transformations. Sekula has a profound gift for language, a deadly accuracy in making polemical observation, coupled with an almost Duchampian gift for wordplay. Thus, in notes like “Bestiary” (in “Appendix-itis”), we see him riffing on his own name, “Dracula/Tarantula/Sekula.” Also in the notebook were unrealized plans for the show. He imagined “Faces (to be projected on the ceiling of the Renaissance Society)”: Ronald Reagan’s is one, accompanied by Chicagoans such as Milton Friedman, Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, and Susan Sontag who, Sekula reminded us, began her career as a young undergraduate and faculty spouse at the University of Chicago. As one would expect, he devoted much thought to how Polonia was to be experienced. Although an aim of his is to challenge assumptions about visual display, Sekula is clearly a master of it as well. For instance, it was Sekula’s idea to hang nearly all of his photographs on the inner walls of the gallery, and to post quotes and epigrams on the walls opposite. These bits of text were trenchant quotes from a wide array of sources: CIA operatives, Simone de Beauvoir, histories of Poland, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and the like. They collectively provided a framework for decoding the pictures. But because they were physically separated from the photos, they avoided Walter Benjamin’s caution that adjacent texts always determine the reading of a photograph. Their epigrammatic style recalled Sontag’s writing and also her observation that the epigram form itself is like the punchy explicitness of a photograph. In any case, the presence of so much text—both in the exhibition and in Sekula’s work overall—pointed to the inexorable and perennial connection between word and image. Considering all the information a viewer needs in order to fully grasp Sekula’s photographs, one can sometimes almost hear them creaking and groaning under the weight of what they must carry. But the works do manage to stand up by themselves, and they function in varying degrees as autonomous, effective works of art.

The large chromogenic prints in Polonia and Other Fables are almost exclusively square, their uniformity suggesting dispassionate objectivity and perhaps something of the conventions of Conceptual art. The most unexpected aspect of Sekula’s work, given its intensely critical and theoretical nature, is the sheer formal power of the images. Sekula has admitted that he is uninterested in traditional notions of picture-making. Still, many of his photographs achieve great visual authority. He jokes about his reputation for being a “bad photographer” (which social documentarian aims for slickness?), but no one could have made that claim here. A picture of the inside of a Polish dance club, Vinyl curtain-wall advertising Warsaw, July 2009 (2009), necessarily taken with a very long exposure time, reveals a patchwork of garish colors and patterns. It says much about the look of Westernization. Other photographs include vast expanses of unexpected color as Sekula replaces our perception of an ashen gray Eastern Europe with a palette that documents its changing visual landscape. Edward Weston cautioned photographers working in color not to simply seek out brightly colored subjects. Accordingly, Sekula’s high-key images use color to make a point and/or to emphasize a certain reality.

Sekula’s information about Poland, its history and present state, would have been new to some viewers. Particularly striking is a CIA agent’s sobering observation that “Poland is the 51st state. . . . Americans have no idea.” Certainly, one left the exhibition with a much more urgent sense of Poland’s fate and its relationship to the United States, specifically Chicago. Like the ages-old situation of landlocked Poland—the Poles being perennial shipbuilders, forever haunted by the sea—Sekula shoots walking figures like ships adrift on vast expanses of pavement. He replaces the flâneur with the weary bodies of urbanites in Warsaw or Chicago. They are a thus a cross between Harry Callahan’s weary Chicagoans and Alberto Giacometti’s spittle-and-carbon existential figures. He demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the fleeting gesture and to the telltale posture—the way clothes drape over (Polish) bodies, the way people smoke, sit, stand. It gradually dawns on the viewer that like all passionate intellectuals Sekula is a reluctant sensualist. Perhaps because of his heightened sense of his own family history, he can convey the ties between child and parent with great insight, even when that means cropping off the head of the mother as in one engaging image of children.

The unexpectedly diminutive figure of a Polish art student at work on the floor of the brutish Chicago Mercantile exchange becomes in Sekula’s hands a quirky Sander-esque occupational portrait. He cleverly upsets conventions of the genre while providing insight into the unlikely situations in which transplanted Poles now find themselves. Like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn whose work this resembles, Sekula displays a great eye for the telling detail (Roland Barthes’s puncta) and a humanist’s sympathy for his subjects’ physical reality. Sekula is thoroughly conversant with photohistory. One sees here echoes of Garry Winogrand’s street-weary denizens, Walker Evans’s sitters and hand tools, and something of the crime-scene spaces of Eugène Atget. Some photos refer directly to well-known masterpieces. For instance, he appropriates Dorothea Lange’s iconic image, Hoe Culture, Aniston, Alabama (1936), a close-up of a fieldworker’s hands, for his own Farmer threshing grass at abandoned airport used by CIA for transport of clandestine “high value” terrorism suspects. Szymany, Poland, July 2009 (2009). Yet Sekula’s image is not about the humility of manual labor, but something much darker. It is a reference to “extraordinary rendition,” the U.S. government’s practice of sending detainees abroad for torture-filled interrogation. Several photographs here documented such “black sites” in Poland. Sekula illustrates how that country has once again played hapless host to some of the world’s worst cruelties.

The Renaissance Society has a venerable history as the premier venue for vanguard art in the Midwest. Its director, Susanne Ghez, must be lauded for thoughtfully curating this exhibition, thereby maintaining the society’s admirable mission. Hamza Walker’s accompanying essay is insightful and authoritative, and represents important writing on Sekula’s art in its own right. Visiting the exhibition, confronting its pictures, texts, and issues, one felt engaged in compelling historical realities and in things that really matter.