Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the Realism of Abstraction

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed ‘narration’ and ‘description’ as these are traced throughout Sekula's project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky). The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism's social world that means that all photographic ‘realism’ is intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of that ‘self-moving substance in the ‘shape of money’, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself

Mainstreaming the money shot: Reflections on the representation of ejaculation in contemporary American cinema

This paper was an extended version of a conference paper first delivered at a three day international conference 'Men's Bodies', University of Nottingham, 2001. The collection was favourably reviewed in the Journal Of European Studies Vol 36 2006: 90-91 in which Tuck's piece was described as 'particularly engaging'