Allan Sekula: Fish Story

Photographer, writer, and critic Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was one of the most influential visual theorists of his generation. His work profoundly impacted conceptual uses of photography and challenged assumptions about the image's role in creating meanings. Blending rigorous research with descriptive realism and impactful narrative, Sekula's photographs and essays explore labor, capitalism, and Marxist theory. Since his death, his influence on understanding photography as both a communicative and aesthetic tool has continued to grow.

“My argument here runs against the commonly held view that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces.” - Allan Sekula, Fish Story

First exhibited in 1995 at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Fish Story is on loan from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the only museum to have collected the entire project. Unfolding over nine interwoven chapters, Fish Story is one of the late 20th century’s most important image-based research projects and has rarely been exhibited as a complete project. Conceived as both an exhibition and a book, the project comprises 105 photographs, two slide projections, and 26 accompanying texts written by the artist that challenge and expand both the tradition of documentary photography and romantic notions of the sea. Underscoring photography's role in labor history and in working-class responses to globalization, Fish Story constitutes a unique record of unemployment and dilapidation of old industrial powers, the capitalist pursuit of cheap labor around the globe, and the strenuous work of seafaring. Fish Story is the result of seven years (1988–1995) of documenting harbors and port cities around the world. Sekula began his journey in Los Angeles at the port in San Pedro, where he grew up, and traveled as far as Korea, Scotland, and Poland, photographing the prosperity, poverty, and political powers that continue to play out in these sites.

SELECTED ARTWORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

The project, which examines the beginnings of an expanding and truly globalized shipping industry, reminds us that the precarious balance between large economic forces, climate change, and international politics has existed across decades. At a time when the world is feeling the strain placed on this international supply chain, Sekula’s Fish Story is once again asking us to consider the invisible human cost of economics. To Sekula, the ocean was the ‘forgotten space.’ Out of mind, it was relegated to the margins of romanticized imaginings of a past long gone; its saline waters and fauna, its complicated histories linking myriad geographies, its trauma and beauty, all replaced by the abstractions of globalized flows of capital.

A new edition of Sekula’s long-out-of-print, seminal publication Fish Story, with a new introduction by Professor Laleh Khalili (SOAS University), has been recently published in print and ebook editions by MACK.