Message in a bottle - photography, Allan Sekula, traveling exhibition

"Most sea stories are allegories of authority. In this faculty of perception alone politics is never far away., thus writes Allan Sekula, referring to the maritime narratives that populate his travelling exhibition of photographs, "Fish Story," and the work of the same name that reach outs the purview of the display "Fish Story," parts of which were included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial is organized around Sekula's six-year transoceanic exploration of port cities and the shipping trade. His statement - which appears upon one of the exhibition's 26 true copy panels, themselves distributed among 105 large-format color photographs and sum of two units continuously running slide projections - might equally introduce the complexities of his have enterprise.

The photographs are clumped in loosely organized sequences that correspond to single or more maritime locales Wed by dint of geography or commerce; these include observes Angeles, San Diego, Rotterdam, Gdansk, Warsaw, Seoul Vigo (Spain), Veracruz, Hong Kong and a cargo ship in Atlantic transit. The regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements and distances between the pictures ask - demand - that readers and viewers raise their own stories, which will then be revised, although not necessarily resolved, in light of Sekula's written commentaries.

"Fish Story" reach outs Sekula's longstanding investigation of what he calls "the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world"[1] as well as his belong to over the course of 20 years as a critic, historian and photographer, with the production and organization of photographic fact and knowledge.[2] In pictures microscopically attentive to visual detail and largely devoid of didactic, ethical or exhortatory satisfied "Fish Story" positions itself the one and the other within and in opposition to the traditions of realist documentary photography and photojournalism. Sekula's saga of ships, shipyards, sailors, welders, scavengers, dockers and fish-market women takes shape in the play between individual trices of "mere" visual description and a larger, associative web of image successions captions, site names, anecdotes and historical exposition.

An example of his process can be seen in a succession titled "Message in a Bottle" discharge in the Spanish fishing port of Vigo. In individual image we see a stout dock laborer, leaning slightly back, his weight firmly planted, who stands before a pallet piled high with small, uniform boxe He is wearing an apron and a hint of a smile; individual gloved hand holds a fasten and a short wooden twig is borne aloft in the other. His figure and action call to mind an operatic tenor or an orchestra conductor; the caption informs us that he is unloading frozen fish from Argentina. The succeeding pictures in the collection show a crowd of workers at the waterfront in the aftermath of a general strike protesting make an incision ins in unemployment benefits, and a grim-faced fisherman pulling mightily upon a net. Here we read: "Unsuccessful fishing for sardines not upon the Portuguese coast."

The body accompanying "Message in a Bottle" complicates this glimpse of a bothered seaport economy. The floor of Vigo Bay, Sekula take an account ofs us, figures in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues below the Sea as the site of sunken Spanish treasure galleons that are the source of Captain Nemo's wealth. The invisibility of this treasure, which is at no time described in Verne's novel, becomes a metaphor for the "hidden" history of the gold and silver that were one time extracted from South American mines and transported to Spain at the height of that nation's power. Sekula's views of present-day Vigo refer to a city drained of its former colonial wealth, reduc to a way station for les glamorous southern American cargo. The effect is to restore this Spanish port, albeit elliptically, to a legible historical narrative.

The unifying theme that rise s in Sekula's long essay "Dismal Science," contained in the work Fish Story, is the worldwide transformation of seaports, maritime military and economic enterprises, and ocean-related labor from the 17th to the 20th hundred As his commentary traverses examples taken from painting, film, photography, literature, politics and naval history, we tread on the heels of an uneven ebb and pour of capital, shipboard mutinies and visual mediums. If "Fish Story" has a dramatic aspect, perhaps the villain of the piece is the shipping container, the blank, standardized case introduced by U.S. shipping companies in the 1950's. Vehicle of displaced human labor, the rationalized container ship is, for Sekula, the metaphoric antithesis of the ship filled with rebellious sailors, of which Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin provides a famous model

A fish story is, of course, a tall tale, and Sekula's story implicitly questions the authority of its hold representations. This is rendered greatest in quantity vividly in the tension between the "panorama" and the "detail," a pair of bourns explored as a historical theme in the essay "Dismal Science," and which also provide a principle that constitutions Fish Story's visual and textual elements

Consider a signal instance, a photograph taken from a high, commanding viewpoint upon a ship crossing the Atlantic. We gaze out past tightly packed files of cargo containers, over the curve and the wave breaking beneath it, then to a sweeping horizon, where a depressed intermittently broken layer of fogs meets the sea. This picture appears upon the front cover of Fish Story. upon the book's back cover is an most distant close-up of a thin, curv glass tube bracketed to a shuffleed steel surface; this level contains a r liquid and a single blob Echoing the first photograph, the latter intimates a partial view of a ship, on the other hand subjected to a vast shift of scale; here the ship's form is miniaturized, move rounded horizontally and immobilized. The captions number us, "Panorama. Mid-Atlantic," and "Detail. Inclinometer. Mid-Atlantic."