Artist, Allan Sekula: Most sea stories are allegories of authority. In this sense alone, politics is never far away. Ships function both as prisons and as engines of flight and escape.
Narrator: That was the photographer and writer Allan Sekula.
The works in front of us are part of his project Fish Story, which took about seven years to complete.
Allan Sekula: It's a work in chapters with these individually framed photographs placed very close together so that there's a set of linkages and connections. What I was hoping to trace is a kind of representation of the sea and of seafaring space. But then the question is, well, what happens to this space?
Narrator: Through his research, Sekula realized there had been a shift in how society understood the sea. It was no longer a natural space but an industrial machine.
Allan Sekula: The cargo container, an American innovation of the mid-1950s, makes the globalization of manufacturing possible. And cargo ships now resemble buildings, giant floating warehouses, shuttling back and forth between fixed points on an unrelenting schedule.
All of this is happening, and what begins to occur is the possibility of a fully automated maritime world. And what interested me was the solitude of the work and the scaling down of crews, leaving their former employees bewildered and jobless.
So there's very different readings of the seas. There is an elite sense of the sea as a place that called to mind heroic efforts and great tragedies. And then for people who work in port labor or in seafaring, there's a kind of violence that exists on an everyday level that's grinding and routine, always dangerous.