In 1973, prior to the advent of the discourse of “postmodernism,” art historian Linda Nochlin declared that for modernism, “abstraction is the law and . . . realism is the criminal.” In this talk, I juxtapose the metaphorical stance of criminality occasionally adopted by photorealist painters and photoconceptual artists in the 1970s against a more literal criminalization of the counterculture and the New Left. Taking up the specific case of Allan Sekula’s confrontations with the San Diego Police Department, I show how both his aesthetic practice and critique of documentary photography respond to political struggles over the taking and making of photographs within a larger framework of state surveillance and repression. While he and his companions in San Diego such as Fred Lonidier and Martha Rosler developed a critique of modernism, their artistic practices were also shaped by the exigency of developing a critique of photographic realism and its uses by the state, one informed by the political practice of countersurveillance and giving rise to what could be called counter-documentary.

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