This talk will explore central themes and questions informing the development of a new research project that sets out to trace continuities and breaks in photographic concepts and practices of sequence. It does so with a view to understanding the transformation of photography since the late 20th century, and what this means for the visual worlds to which it gives form. The talk will pursue this broad aim through discussion of two contrasting bodies of photographic work for which sequence is an integral critical concern, namely, Allan Sekula’s Untitled Slide Sequence (1976) and Message in a Bottle from Fish Story (1995), and The Mute, an ongoing project by Sara Oscar (2025).

Sequence is a familiar term in photographic practice and criticism that deals with ordered sets of images, especially those constructed with narrative intent. Notably, this sense of photographic sequence points one in two critical directions, firstly, towards a range of photographic strategies that appear familiar to the point of banality (as an online search for „photographic sequence“ will quickly reveal), but also, secondly, towards powerful critical expectations that are carried over from historical practices which adopted strategies of sequencing in order to envision things hidden or resistant to visualisation. But, importantly, sequence also has other meanings for photography, two of which stand out here. With hindsight, it is remarkable how a particular conception of sequence came to characterise theoretical and popular ideas of photographic time over the 20th century. Whether clichéd or erudite, marking moments sundered apart or sutured together, widely accepted and influential ideas of photographic time have tended towards agreement on its fundamentally sequential form in ways that remain under-examined. Notably, from a technical viewpoint, the history of photographic apparatuses is significantly shaped by the conventions of sequentiality according to which images have been laid down on sensitive substrates, as in generations of roll-film and, to a certain extent, digital cameras.

Sekula and Oscar present historically distinct, critically sophisticated approaches to the problems and possibilities of sequence for photography. Examination of these examples shows sequence to harbour powerful potentials to produce disjunction, disorder and the failure of narrative as much as to establish conjunction, order and narrative sense. Rather than opting to limit understanding of sequence to one or other pole of this contrast – championing either disjunction or conjunction, sense or nonsense – I suggest that we take the apparent antinomies posed in these convoluted relationships as our starting point. In this vein, the talk will explore what it means to say photographic sequence is exemplary of the expectation that photography has the ability to make sense of the contested worlds we suppose ourselves to share, just as it gives these worlds their obviously heterogeneous, unequal and conflicted visual form.