To the late artist Allan 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.

Through what he termed ‘critical realism,’ in his photographic and text work Fish Story (1989–1995), Sekula brought the ocean center stage and highlighted the hidden but continuously growing role it plays for global trade – today accounting for 90% of the world’s transportation. For six years, he accompanied container ships on their voyages linking ports now connected via a dense network of routes. Along the way, he documented a view over the top of a loaded freight ship somewhere mid-Atlantic, welders in a foundry in the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, the automated ECT/Sea-Land Terminal in the Port of Rotterdam, the Hyundai Shipyard in Ulsan, Volkswagens from a factory in Puebla waiting to be loaded for export, and a couple in the Los Angeles harbor who live from scavenging and shelter in empty containers. In his photographs, the sea is the link between these places. At the same time, it is incidental, backgrounded by a large-scale industrial infrastructure – a photograph of a fugitive eel in the Jagalchi fish market in Busan is a scarce reminder of its aliveness. These and many more compelling images are on view in the exhibition Allan Sekula: Fish Story on view at Walker Art Center from August 24th, 2023. 

Today, artists are paying close attention to the ocean, and many of them are indebted to Sekula: from the collective CAMP, whose video and publishing project Wharfage (2009–2013) homes in on workers in Sharjah Creek, to Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film Leviathan (2012), an experiment that saw the artists attach GoPro cameras to fisherfolk on a trawler in Massachusetts. Centering on globalization and empire from a Caribbean perspective, Julien Creuzet’s sculptures comprise items shipped from factories in the Global South to the Global North, where the majority eventually gets discarded to wash up again as debris on the beach, whereas Dineo Seshee Bopape’s video and sculptural installation Lerato laka le a phela le a phela le a phela / My love is alive, is alive, is alive (2022) considers the ocean a repository of memories, including of the transatlantic slave trade.

While the ocean in contemporary art is far from forgotten, through Sekula’s work, we understand that it is cast into oblivion by way of conceptual and physical separations, portended through the course of its still-expanding commodification, beginning with the shift from early capitalism’s primitive accumulation to industrialized trade and, most recently, the dangerous push for deep-sea mining. ‘In the past,’ Sekula wrote, ‘harbor residents were deluded by their senses into thinking that a global economy could be seen and heard and smelled.’ For him, the invention of the shipping container in the 1950s marked a pivotal moment when life and death, which were previously inextricably connected to the ocean, disappeared from ports and cities and were replaced by anonymous boxes whose rectangular shape, as he pointed out, resembles that of a dollar bill. (He also asked why Pop and Conceptual artists examining advertisement and seriality didn’t tend to the ocean and to the container as the object par excellence embodying mass production.)

Before container ships revolutionized the shipping industry, Sekula identified the development of steam-powered vessels in the late 18th century as another key technological moment. Replacing sailboats, with their errant routes and dependence on the weather, steamships cut smoothly through the ocean as both a surface across which the abstracted flows of globalized capitalism could glide and a striated space subsumed under a uniform cartographic grid. It’s no coincidence that, at the time when the first steam-powered ships went to sea, J.M.W. Turner was painting his roiling seascapes, depicting wind and waves as sublime forces when their influence over seafaring was diminishing. Today, another critical shift in perspective is required, as climate change marks our impact on the weather and reminds us of our deep dependence on it, with the ocean playing a key role in mitigating its negative effects.

Sekula’s work remains so relevant precisely because the processes of commodification he documented in Fish Story continue. For him, the movement of goods could only be fully explained through abstraction, where human, and we might say nonhuman, relations are alienated and obscured by the exchange-value of commodities. Indeed, he called the container a ‘coffin of labor,’ concealing the worker for the illusion of a liquid modernity of uninhibited flows. The sights of harbor and sea, and the smells of tuna, guano, and molasses, gave way to what he called ‘the positivism of statistics and quantitative abstraction.’

Consisting of writings as well as 105 photographs and slide projections, Fish Story grapples with this alienation by insisting on specificity and materiality – always listing what is on view, from a boy looking at his mother on the Staten Island Ferry to an engine room-wiper’s ear protection or an inclinometer and including the location – at the same time as it grapples with abstraction vs. realism in photography. But, where Sekula wrote that weather had diminished in importance once steamships had replaced sailboats, today it is becoming distressingly obvious that all life on this planet – and the supposedly predictable routes of container ships – is being upended by the loss of relative climate stability. Viewed now, Turner’s romantic seascapes evoke less of a lamentable demise of our dependence on the waves than a reminder that they are, indeed, roiling.

Today, we may look toward Sekula’s strategies to bring back forgotten spaces – the ocean, the weather, or otherwise. Fish Story offers guidance for tethering the abstractions of data – whether oceanic, meteorological, or recent attempts to turn climate change into monetizable risk – to concrete material. It helps us name those who mostly contribute to global warming, and those who are mostly affected by it. Rather than viewing climate change as a new sublime and either spectacularizing it or depersonalizing our responsibilities towards it, through Sekula’s art we can shift our perspective from the globe to the planet, and from globalization’s abstracted movement of goods to the tangible and interconnected planetary systems they form part of. On the planet, not the globe, flows are far from even: some are forceful, others barely trickle.

Allan Sekula’s estate is represented by Michel Rein (Paris, Brussels).

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, editor, and the Director of Swiss Institute, New York. Her work focuses on ecology, technology, and their various social intersections through feminist and queer perspectives.

‘Allan Sekula: Fish Story’ is on view at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, from August 24, 2023 to January 21, 2024.

Caption for full-bleed image: Allan Sekula, Chapter Three: "Middle Passage" from Fish Story (#39),1988-1995. Walker Art Center. Courtesy of the artist.