top of page

Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula (Jan 15 1951 - Aug 10 2013)

was a Polish - American photographer, filmmaker,

theorist and critic. Sekula was born in Erie -Pennsylvania,

and his family moved to San Pedro, California in the early 60´s.

He graduated from University of San Diego CA, in 1974 with

Master of Fine Arts, after taking a B.A.

bachelor in Biological Science from the same institution.He tought at the California Institute of the Arts for nearly 30 years until his death in 2013. His principal medium was photography and writing,

but throughout his career he has also works of performance arts and installations.

Still, his most influential works are the photoseries combined with political esseys,

his work frequently focused on large economic systems, or

”the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.”

M_HKA_SEKULA_FOTO_BRAM_GOOTS_LRES10_36.j

Photo of Allan Sekula

Chosen Works

Fish Story (1995)

Fish Story is a book in seven chapters,

and it consists of nearly as much photos as text.

The photographs in Fish Story first appeared

in the eary 1990´s as an exhibition in its own.

The images are tale-telling, emitting a gleaming blue light and the subjects in the pictures are in a

precarious position.They leave us wanting more,

and that is fortunately given in Fish Story.

The textual back drop is a marxist caleidoscopic view on modernism, or rather globalism, in the childhood of internet and liquid modernity, this work has been called ”The thawing of post-modernism” .

sekula-clip.jpg

The Forgotten Space (2010)

The Forgotten Space is a video-documentary by

Allan Sekula and Noel Burch, and it cover the whole line of distribution from vessel to train to trailer and

fueters interviews with underpaid american

truckdrivers, displaced belgian farmers and factory workers from China.

The footage in the movie are from the same trips as

the photoes in Fish Story, and gives the story a new dimension and depth.

maxresdefault.jpg

Scientific background

Maritime shipping accounts for over 90% of the world’s trade,

and 70% of this is containerized cargo distrubuted amongst 53 000 ships.

The arerage crew aboard the previous generation of ships, the cargo ships

of the 50´s, were between 50 and 100, but the crew on an average 5-8 000 TAU container ships has a crew of 20-30, the slightly smaller ships have only 8 in the crew.

The math Malcom McLean did in 1956, one second before he invented the TAU container, was that the cost of unloading a medium sized cargo ship

was $5.83 per ton, but with the Ideal-X, cost would be as low as $0.16 a ton. The result this calculation was in many was not ideal.

The low demand on labour was a blow to the bow for maritime

trade unions, and the safety onboard these ships with skeleton crew

were compromised.

Container ships lose their cargo in many different circumstanses.

The forces of wind acting on the side of a cargo ship are strong, and could

pry loose a badly secured container, high waves could also nock them off.

Most go overboard on the open sea during storms but there are some

examples of whole ships being lost with their cargo, as the MOL Comfort and the El Faro in namely 2013 and 2015. When containers are dropped,

they immediately become an environmental threat – termed ”marine debris”.

If the content of the container cant hold air, it will rapidly sink, if it floats it

poses a danger to other ships. In any case, marine debris poses a danger.

Screen-Shot-2017-07-11-at-11.02.06-AM.jp
Rena7.jpg

Methods

Fish Story is the third in a cycle of works on the imaginary and material geographies of

the advanced capitalist world. The first work was Sketch for a Geographpy Lesson (1983),

that charted a relation between the pictoral German romanticism and the trip-wire boarders of

the Cold War, the second was Canadian Notes (1986) on the iconography of banknotes.


 

Fish Story is not simply a book that were written and published like a novel,

but consists of seven chapters that represents seven different exihibitions between 1990 and 94.

In the exhibitions 105 images organized in a sequence with 26 text panels interspersed

between the images. The relationship between text and images is necessarily different in the book than in the initial exhibitions, and in the book it appears like long prosaic texts rather than several independent essays.


 

These exhibitions were put up in California, Danmark, Germany and The Netherlands

in great harbour cities and were partially funded by the International Longshore and Warehouse

Union and the principal west coast dockworkers organisation.

Some dockworkers were also guides at the exhibitions, and contributed

to workshops and discussions in context to the exhibitions.

This culminated in a book so timely published in 1995.

The world wide web had been launched the previous year, and

Ten Summoners Tales by Sting was the first item to be sold online.


 

Allan Sekula writes with a sharp socialistic pen. It is clear to see from Sekulas text that the shipping

industry today closely resembles the London anno 19th century that Marx and Engels describes.

The sailors and their weapon of mutiny is very similar to  revolutionary socialism, and the term

workshop of the world, that was coined on England in the start of the industrial revolution,

is now suited to China, in the age of globalization.

Keywords

Liquid

Proletariat

Grounded

Precariat

Intermidiate

Dialectic

Globalization

Trade Union

Irony

References and links

bottom of page