Steve Edwards in Radical Philosophy, ‘Socialism and the Sea: Allan Sekula 1951 – 2013’

During the 1990s the sea increasingly bubbled to the surface of his work. From this time he undertook a sustained study of the maritime economy and its representations; he travelled on a cargo vessel across the middle passage and he sailed on the Global Mariner, the agit-ship of the International Transport Workers’ Federation. The two long essays in Fish Story indicate the breadth of this engagement: spanning representation of the sea from Dutch marine painting to minimalism and Hollywood. In the process, he muses on an astonishing range of topics: the transformation of Dutch panoramic depictions linking sea and land; the wandering vessel in Turner and Conrad; the figure of the sailor and the theme of mutiny in modernist film, photography and literature; Hollywood’s dumb fantasies of the sea; the ship as machine; Popeye; and the oceans in the cultural imaginary of left-wing thinkers and military planners. This is typical of his additive imagination, which was shaped by modernist montage; there was always another connection to make and a further reference to add. At times, he found it difficult to halt the dialectical propulsion of his own thought. Moby Dick supplied his paradigm.

 

Jennifer Burris in Afterall, ‘Material Resistance: Allan Sekula’s Forgotten Space’

Through this engagement with the political implications of formal space, Burch and Sekula show how sometimes the most significant insights derive not from linear arguments, but from implied correspondences and visual allusions.

Allan Sekula lecture at Emily Car University, October 2012

Overview of work shown with The Forgotten Space.

Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian, ‘Allan Sekula: filming the forgotten resistance at sea’

Sekula believes that seafaring work, like many other forms of manual labour, is ignored by many journalists whose own class status predisposes them towards fixating on white-collar and mental labour. But, as The Forgotten Space shows to haunting effect, this invisibility is also structural: containerisation has depeopled the bustling port cultures of previous eras and left in their wake automated landscapes.

Phil Steinberg – Sekula, Space, and Protest: Reflections on the Ship of Empty Boxes

Phil Steinberg (Professor of Political Geography at Durham University) asks ‘What would Allan do?’, as he reflects on a weekend in London presenting at our Birkbeck symposium, visiting Allan Sekula displays at Tate Modern and Tate Britain, and by chance witnessing a protest of Tate’s BP sponsorship.

Tourism requires stasis in others

Emma Smith #TheShipofEmptyBoxes