The Henry Art Gallery owns only 10 of Allan Sekula's 30 WTO protest photographs. owns all 30 of Allan Sekula's WTO protest photographs, and is only showing 10 because of limited wall space on the mezzanine. Then don't use the mezzanine! The full set should be up.

That complaint aside, even with just 10 we get a chance to see how heroically Sekula set out to be Zen about the protests. Meaning: he didn't want to overlay anything on the scene. He wanted to see it.

That meant shots like the one above, where absolutely everything is glass and nothing is direct—so different from smoke-and-carnival shots that it stands out as a moment of unsettling silence. Because the businessmen are behind glass, we're extra-aware that the photographer is behind the glass of the camera's lens. The photograph is disturbing precisely because it so aggressively suppresses physical contact, perfectly capturing the fear of it erupting.

On display with the photographs is Sekula's letter describing how he thought about this work. It says:

In photographing the Seattle demonstrations my working idea was to move with the flow of protest, from dawn to 3 a.m. if need be, taking in the lulls, the waiting and the margin of events. The rule of thumb for this sort of anti-journalism: no flash, no telephoto lens, no gas mask, no auto-focus, no press pass and no pressure to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence.

Later, working at the light-table, and reading the increasingly stereotypical descriptions of the new face of protest, I realized all the more that a simple descriptive physiognomy was warranted. The alliance on the streets was indeed stranger, more varied and inspired than could be conveyed by the cute alliterative play with “teamsters” and “turtles.”

I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.

Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against the abstraction of global capital. There was a strong feminist dimension to this testimony, and there was also a dimension grounded in the experience of work. It was the men and women who work on the docks, after all, who shut down the flow of metal boxes from Asia, relying on individual knowledge that there is always another body on the other side of the sea doing the same work, that all this global trade is more than a matter of a mouse-click.

One fleeting hallucination could not be photographed. As the blast of stun grenades reverberated amidst the downtown skyscrapers, someone with a boom box thoughtfully provided a musical accompaniment: Jimi Hendrix’s mock-hysterical rendition of the American national anthem. At that moment, Hendrix returned to the streets of Seattle, slyly caricaturing the pumped-up sovereignty of the world’s only superpower.

At the Henry, which is also featuring Stranger columnist Christopher DeLaurenti's surprisingly musical recording created from field recordings of the protests. It sounds unlikely, but this used to be the only recording I could write to. I know it inside and out, and it really is a marvel.

There's also a Flickr pool called Henry WTO+10 where you can add your own photos from the protests.

More of Sekula's WTO images here.