ALLAN SEKULA | DEAR BILL GATES (TRIPTYCH)

In 1999, Allan Sekula, whose art and writing often dealt with the relationship between art and technology, created Dear Bill Gates, a creative action in which he swam as close as he could to the Microsoft founder’s house in Seattle. Accompanying this photograph is a typed, anonymous letter written on a manual typewriter that references Gates’ purchase of Winslow Homer’s painting Lost on the Grand Banks. He described the action as follows:

‘Recently I wrote a letter to a man who embodies the new paradigm of the global archivist, the facilitator of the new virtual and disembodied family of man. He's no Steichen, since he refuses the role of the grand paternalistic editor, preferring in a more veiled manner to manage the global archive and retrieval system from which any number of pictorial statements might be constructed. In effect, he allows his clients to play in the privacy of their homes the role of mini-Steichen, perusing vast quantities of images from around the world, culling freely-but for a price-with meaning in mind’ (‘Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs),’ October, Vol. 102, Autumn 2002, p. 4).