White-collar blues: Allan Sekula casts an eye over the professional-managerial class

A contribution to a special issue of Nonsite on the Professional-Managerial Class. The essay examines works by Allan Sekula, primarily Aerospace Folktales and the long essay 'Photography Between Labour and Capital' in the light of the debate on the Professional-Managerial Class in the 1970s. I argue that Sekula fully engaged with this debate, reading extensively in the field, and that it informed a cycle of works. In particular, I suggest, that he looked at the division within the PMC between engineers as agents of capital and the liberal wing, focussing particularly on 'technical realism' in the engineering imagination. These issues are thematised in Areospace Folktales, which focuses on his father - an unemployed aerospace engineer in crisis situation - and the 'I' of the work, that speaks from a different social location.