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Fish Story. Allan Sekula
Читать онлайн.Название Fish Story
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9789491435096
Автор произведения Allan Sekula
Жанр Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Издательство Ingram
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Space is transformed. The ocean floor is wired for sound. Fishing boats disappear in the Irish Sea, dragged to the bottom by submarines. Businessmen on airplanes read exciting novels about sonar. Waterfront brothels are demolished or remodeled as condominiums. Shipyards are converted into movie sets. Harbors are now less havens (as they were for the Dutch) than accelerated turning-basins for supertankers and container ships. The old harbor front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past. Heavy metals accumulate in the silt. Busboys fight over scarce spoons in front of a plate-glass window overlooking the harbor. The backwater becomes a frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea.
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1–2Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor. February 1990.
3, 6Welder’s booth in bankrupt Todd Shipyard. Two years after closing. Los Angeles harbor. San Pedro, California. July 1991.
4–5Pipe fitters finishing the engine room of a tuna-fishing boat. Campbell Shipyard. San Diego harbor. August 1991.
7Remnants of a movie set. Abandoned shipyard. Los Angeles harbor. Terminal Island, California. January 1993.
8The rechristened Exxon Valdez awaiting sea trials after repairs. National Steel and Shipbuilding Company. San Diego harbor. August 1990.
9“Lead Fish.” Variant of a conference room designed for the Chiat/Day advertising agency. Architect: Frank Gehry. Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. May 1988.
10Remnants of a Roman harbor near Minturno, Italy. June 1992.
11Hammerhead crane unloading forty-foot containers from Asian ports. American President Lines terminal. Los Angeles harbor. San Pedro, California. November 1992.
12–13Shipyard-workers’ housing–built during the Second World War–being moved from San Pedro to South-Central Los Angeles. May 1990.
14Koreatown, Los Angeles. April 1992.
15Workers cleaning up chemical spill after refinery explosion. Los Angeles harbor. Wilmington, California. October 1992.
16Abandoned shipyard used by Marine Corps Expeditionary Force for “counter-terrorist” exercises. Los Angeles harbor. Terminal Island, California. November 1992.
17“Pancake,” a former shipyard sandblaster, scavenging copper from a waterfront scrapyard. Los Angeles harbor. Terminal Island, California. November 1992.
18Testing robot-truck designed to move containers within automated ECT/Sea-Land cargo terminal. Maasvlakte, Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. September 1992.
LOAVES AND FISHES
A German friend wrote me early in January 1991, just before the war in the Persian Gulf: “You should try to photograph over-determined ports, like Haifa and Basra.” Her insight, that some ports are fulcrums of history, the levers many, and the results unpredictable, was written in the abstract shorthand of an intellectual. But she shares the materialist curiosity of people who work in and between ports, such as the Danish sailors who discovered that Israel was secretly shipping American weapons to Iran in the 1980s. A crate breaks, spilling its contents. But that’s too easy an image of sudden disclosure, at once archaic and cinematic, given that sailors rarely see the thrice-packaged cargo they carry nowadays. A ship is mysteriously renamed. Someone crosschecks cargo manifests, notices a pattern in erratic offshore movements, and begins to construct a story, a suspicious sequence of events, where before there were only lists and voyages, a repetitive and routine industrial series.
Sailors and dockers are in a position to see the global patterns of intrigue hidden in the mundane details of commerce. Sometimes the evidence is in fact bizarrely close at hand: Weapons for the Iraqis in the forward hold. Weapons for the Iranians in the aft hold. Spanish dockers in Barcelona laugh at the irony of loading cargo with antagonistic destinations. For a moment the global supply network is comically localized, as pictorially condensed as a good political cartoon. Better to scuttle the ship at the dock. But limpet mines are tools of governments, not of workers.
At the very least, governments find it necessary to dispute the testimony of maritime workers. Ronald Reagan, the symbolic Archimedes of a new world of uninhibited capital flows, worried about the stories being told in 1986. The Great Anecdotalist presumably had a good ear for yarns: these “quite exciting” reports “attributed to Danish sailors” about shipload after shipload of weapons moving from the Israeli