Allan Sekula was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1959, and was based in Los Angeles from 1985 until his death in 2013. He began his adult life in the years of protest against the Vietnam War, studying Marxists thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, and went on to revitalise the American tradition of documentary photography and social criticism as an artist and a theorist. He began making installations but gradually shifted towards photography and text essays, which allow him to analyse capitalist logic in a global world and the traffic of human beings for the purpose of labour. His strong commitment to production and how it shapes our bodies and the way we live has led him to photograph the employees of large factories and shipping companies. Part of his work has focused on the sea as a forgotten space, in which the international trade of the big multinationals plays out the savage logic of capital.

Since his first solo exhibition at the California Institute of Arts, Valencia (1973), Sekulla's work has been presented in numerous venues in the USA and Europe, such as the Folkwang Museum, Essen (1984), MoMA PS1, New York (1987), Witte de With, Rotterdam (1995), Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2001), Camera Austria, Graz (2005), MuHKA, Antwerp (2010), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2017), and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2023). His photographs are part of the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; and MACBA, Barcelona.