TWO OPPORTUNITIES TO SEE ALLAN SEKULA'S WORK IN LONDON

In my view, the American photographer and academic Allan Sekula, who died last year, has done more than anyone to help re-imagine the maritime, bringing it forward from that awful, cloyingly romantic world of windjammers and pretty fishing harbours (see my post here of 18 October 2012).
I owe a huge personal debt to Sekula’s master-work Fish Story (1996) which combined the eye of a photographer with scholarly reasoning, and is arguably the key recent work in understanding the re-imagining of the sea and ships.  He commented on the emergence of a ‘modern maritime space’ of mechanisation and colonialism in the nineteenth century and he argued that, by the late twentieth century, this maritime space had disappeared from the public gaze.  But now, hidden from view, the business of the sea still takes place on the container parks of Asia and the fishing fields of the Atlantic, and over years, Sekula has documented these.
Fish Story has been through many iterations as it moved from gallery to gallery and collection to collection, and one fragment of it is on display in the currently chaotic thing that is Tate Britain.  Quite unknown to the attendants I asked, there is a single room devoted until the end of this month to a single chapter of Fish Story*.  In it, a cassette whirrs through 80 slides taken by Sekula in the post-industrial landscapes of Newcastle and Glasgow.  The slides are losing their colour; many of the people of forty years ago in their knock-down fashions are now dead; and the rhythmic noise of the projector reminds me of some archaic piece of maritime machinery;  And here I am in this architecture of Empire (for that is what the Tate is) watching them.  It is a grotesque juxtaposition, made more startling by the apparent indifference there is to the installation and its whereabouts.
There is another exhibit currently devoted to Sekula, in the all together more agreeable surroundings of the Tate Modern.  Waiting for Tear Gas is another slide sequence.  Both are worth visiting, as this guy was a master.

This photo by Allan Sekula called Bo'sun Driving the Forward Winch is not in the Tate show, but it is in my copy of Fish Story.  It is typical of his work.  I doubt if the Royal Society of 'Marine Artists' gets involved with this kind of thing.


* - or so it says, but there is little reference to these images in my copy of the book.