Like a Net: Diving into the Political in Allan Sekula's Fish Story
On March 23, 2021, the massive shipping container Ever Given was jammed between the narrow shores of the Suez Canal. This event lingers on the fringes of collective memory as a strange moment in seafaring history, as a comical accident held the world economy hostage for 6 days. The Ever Given carried a cargo of “COVID era” goods: "Lenovo laptops, Ikea furniture, wearable blankets”—items wanted for a Western world at home.1 The GDP of a small nation allegedly vanished over the course of a week, as the global eddies of capital ground to a halt over a ship being stuck in “the wrong place” at “the wrong time”.2 A photo of a single excavator not even the size of the prow, digging away at the oceanic monstrosity, was quickly captioned: “me just trying my best”— a nod to the futility we all feel at the scale of our problems and our comically small capacity to change them. As one cartoonist put it virally on twitter: “we are all in a way that big ship”. In a rare moment, the social, political, and economic circumstances that often feel above (or beneath) us calcified into a practical, human, experience.
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Image courtesy Kim Bhasin. -
Image by Chaz Hutton. Courtesy Kim Bhasin.
This collision between obscure economic forces and daily life, particularly through the container ship, is the core subject of photographer, writer, and filmmaker Allan Sekula. A researcher of the intersection of maritime economics and its human costs, Sekula presciently identified the origins of the Suez Canal debacle. In his intensively researched project Fish Story (1988–1995), Sekula documented the people caught in the center of these capitalist maelstroms at sea. Fish Story, as articulated by philosopher Alberto Toscano, is a "critical montage of photographs, long essays, and observations on the mutations of maritime capitalism – [ it] is also a passage from panorama to detail, from a mercantile ideology of the sea as an object of strategic overview to an increasingly Taylorised and militarized ‘forgotten space’, in which the difficulty in producing an aesthetic ‘realism’ concerning capitalism’s more abstract dimensions is redoubled by the rendering invisible, and powerless, of maritime labour."3
This somewhat impenetrable description presents Fish Story as a historical and philosophical project which accounts for the changes in how people view the sea romantically and ideologically through critical photography. This is only part of the picture, one which can best be supplemented by the numbers themselves. Fish Story was made to be both an exhibition and a book, containing 9 chapters, 105 photographs, 26 texts, and two slide projections with 80 slides each. Fish Story was researched over 7 years and involved travel to 7 countries to document the changes of how maritime space was being reimagined in the early 1990s. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh further considered the piece a “polyphonic, time-oriented photographic work”—speaking more to the formal aspects of what it means to view or read Fish Story. 4
These varying descriptions not only give an account of what Fish Story contained, but also highlight the nebulous range of its interpretations. The vastness of such a project serves to document political fact at the scale of its abstraction, but the result is a daunting volume of material. For Toscano, this volume was used to illustrate a broader culture shift in the way human beings have attempted to “map” global systems. He considered Fish Story as primarily an illustrative tool, presenting both the scope of the problem (its geographic breadth) and its consequence (the portraits of those impacted by containerized shipping). Toscano views Sekula through the lens of “the aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, and the broader contemporary task of making capitalism into something representable, and thus subject to criticism, and ideally, accountable. For Toscano, Fish Story is an instrumental artwork in service of politics, and it operates in a second order to an overarching critique of our political and economic system. This has been the traditional approach to justifying the politics of an artwork, and has a long tradition within modernity, whereby art is in service to social transformation. While this approach has its own issues, the format of Sekula’s work, large scale and research driven, has recently been challenged on the grounds of its efficacy to achieve such a goal, raising the question “when exactly is a work of art political?”
In a recent essay in Artforum, art historian Claire Bishop articulated this challenge by carefully observing a trend of projects like Sekula’s. Bishop addresses first and foremost the forms which these practices take, and secondly the types of knowledge they produce. Her argument grounds these artistic forms, as well as their positions on knowledge and attention, through the lens of the internet, and recent developments in digital technology. Bishop divides these practices into three groups, the second of which is most applicable to Sekula. This approach is defined by “an inverse relationship to new technology, a rejection of digital media, and a fascination with the obsolete and the analog.” Sekula did in fact eschew the idea of the internet and new digital technology as a driving economic and aesthetic force. The lasting impact of these forms is clear.5 The result of which, Bishop argues, is twofold. On the one hand it creates didactic art which challenges the truth value of the research by allowing personal narrative. On the other, is the authorial voice of the artist that cannot be contended with.6 At its core, the call to action from Bishop could best be described with her declaration that “the stakes have changed. Some formal strategies might need to be rethought.” This overabundance of information creates a crisis of attention, and while Bishop does not mention Sekula by name, this crisis nevertheless poses a significant critique that needs to be addressed.7
Fish Story, I argue, poses an unconsidered answer to this crisis of attention in its sheer scope. As scholars such as Benjamin Young argue, the core argumentative structures of Fish Story are neither an amassment of data, nor an excess of narrative, but rather two key formats: the slide show and the book.8 These two driving axes pose a different viewing experience than Bishop posits. The first axis (a slide show) implies a flexible approach to time, one which Buchloh considered the defining feature of Fish Story. This temporality is one of limited duration of exposure. The slides only last a limited number of seconds before moving on to the next. They neither demand nor expect full mastery over each image, but instead propose a more tidal ebb and flow of attention that comes and goes. The logic of this approach can be easily applied to the experience of photographs and texts as a whole. This is also affirmed by the second axis (the book) of the project. Here attention is not demanded but rewarded. A reader dives into the pages, submerging themselves in image and text for a certain period, only to reemerge, catching their breath and only submerging once again when one has time. The notion of total consumption of a large-scale aesthetic project such as this is more the product of capitalism’s increasing demands over our time than it is a problem of attention.9 Some readers finish a book, some skim, and others skip all together. Only the curator and maybe the collector feel compelled to see in bulk, and to see with total mastery.
The subject of Fish Story is ultimately an attempt at articulating the economically ineffable. It is at its core a problem not of attention, but of perspective. Art historian Hubert Damisch posed this very question of perspective simultaneously with the tail end of Sekula’s research: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence: but can't we try, if not to show it at least to derive some sense of it, in such a way that language might articulate its silence and discourse gain access to it?”10 The immense and minuscule scales of human life caught within the global shipping industry are not there to be discovered and consumed, but rather are presented so that the viewer might reorient to these realities. Scholars of Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have better identified this relationship between perspective and understanding: ”What changes when we come to understand are not the facts, but the attitude. The change is a change of perspective; a rearrangement of what has been in front of us all along.”11 To change perspective, and thus attitude, is the most fundamental level of politics. After all one never solves problems of which they are not aware.
In Fish Story, this change is fostered through an inverted use of image and text. Rather than pure documentary photography, which sees text used to caption imagery, or imagery which illustrates the text, Sekula uses text to illustrate the images. The first photo in Fish Story depicts binoculars, which can be cheaply rented to gain greater access to passing ships. Similarly the first text opens with a discussion of growing up in a harbor town, and the kinds of events and images the artist witnessed in such a place. This opening pairing orients the viewers vantage point toward the perception of the sea itself, while the second image depicts a young boy in the same space. Harbors transform from the place where one sees “the concrete movement of goods” to abstracted spaces made to be “accelerated turning-basins for supertankers and container ships”.12 The text mirrors the binoculars, granting us added detail of the images by changing the viewer’s context and narrowing scope before ultimately widening again. The photos oscillate between these views as well, with camera formats moving between wide angle vistas, and close-up portraits.13 This detail was brought to my attention by Benjamin Young, who further notes the ways in which Fish Story incorporates a dynamic perspective, shifting between formats, angles, and subjects which prevents a singular fixed perspective. These shifting visual reference points replicate ideological ones, as Sekula tasks the viewer to suddenly visualize an invisible system.
This textual and photographic style is reminiscent of the contingent nature of experience found in philosophies of perspectivism, especially in its capacity to address the imperceptibly large through the minute detail. Writing over a hundred years ago on another romantic locale, the forest, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote “this invisibility, this being hidden, is not merely a negative quality, but a positive one which transforms the thing it hides, making a new thing of it. In this sense it is absurd to try to see the forest, as the aforementioned saying declares. The forest is latent as such."14 The only perceivable reality of the forest, are in fact its trees. It is invisible because it surrounds us. In much the same way, the inarticulability of global maritime space begets a new economic reality marked by its own inconspicuousness, in which all of us swim. Years after Fish Story, Sekula would return to this theme along with filmmaker Noël Burch in the form of a documentary, The Forgotten Space. Sekula, narrating the film, reminds the viewer that "of all the forgotten spaces the sea, in its ancient terribleness, is the most forgotten. The sea is really remembered only when maritime disaster strikes. When the black tide rolls in.”15 The only means to depict such a reality is through its own incompleteness. These vantage points, in which viewers are welcome to submerge in, and emerge from, do not transform our environments, but rather awaken us to our political circumstances. Ortega y Gasset, in his meditation on forests, offers a profound acknowledgment of our own contingency: "I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself.” Fish Story, with its humanist attempt at addressing a global and abstract system, offers a similar call to see our surroundings differently so that we might transform them.
What does it mean to pay attention? In Fish Story, attention constitutes an awareness of the circumstances of our own economies— the materials, individuals, and relationships between them— especially in our seldom documented ports. But with this awareness of circumstance comes their inevitable change over time. Today, there are images in Fish Story that can be read through entirely different perspectives. Photographs of a pallet fire and empty shipping containers filled with sand, while once pointing to the excess of capitalism’s flow of goods, now register as uniquely dystopian images. They evoke the annual massive wildfires now typical across North America or seem to allude to the ongoing South American water crisis and rising desertification. These images speak to early inclinations of Sekula’s future projects Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010) which tackle the Anthropocene more directly. The catalysts of our contemporary ecological disasters are the same economic practices that Sekula placed under scrutiny decades ago. While working in a different medium than Fish Story, artists like John Akomfrah engage in similar large scale projects that aim to shift perspectives around capitalism and our climate like Purple (2017). In an all-encompassing installation of sound and moving image, Purple uses contemporary and archival footage to trace the relationships between the built environment and the natural world. Akomfrah offers a similar lament as Sekula, mourning the loss of natural spaces across the globe, in much the way Sekula mourns the loss of maritime space. Akomfrah’s work demonstrates the way Fish Story remains a viable approach, one capable of adapting to new circumstances. Built into Sekula’s documentation of wastefulness were their inevitable outcomes, given second and even third lives through a perspectivist visual logic which lends itself to ongoing reinterpretation.
This does not mean that Sekula was prophetic, nor that every facet of oceanic oppression was documented through his lens. As authors like Christina Sharpe note, Fish Story does little to account for the way in which the transatlantic slave trade provided the most profound examples of both containerization and systematic exploitation at sea.16 If containerization is, for Sekula, the substructure of global capitalism and the invisible exploitation it produces, then the slave trade was the proving ground for its essential principles. This critical underlying context for containerization alters our present circumstance surrounding global trade and the sea, evoking images of sinking ships carrying predominantly Black and Brown migrants to Europe. These lacunae do not negate Sekula’s politics, but rather serve to reinforce it. What makes Fish Story a political artwork is not its ability to be all-encompassing. That would mirror the domineering tendencies of the very system it hopes to criticize. Through an emphasis on perspective, Sekula’s work proposes that shifting political values requires first a shift in one’s viewpoint. Altering the viewer’s perspective to see what one otherwise could not creates possibility where none was conceivable. In this way identifying the unnoticed conditions within Fish Story only furthers its aesthetic principles. It adds yet another perspective to better attend to our shifting circumstances. To work within Ortega y Gasset’s metaphor: as our awareness grows, so too does the forest. When is an artwork political? I would argue that the real answer is to reorient our idea of a starting place, to “remember the sea from the land…after the panorama has closed in, like a net."▪︎17
Allan Sekula: Fish Story is on view at the Walker Art Center from August 24, 2023–January 21, 2024.
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