When the Black Tide Rolls In.The Forgotten Space of the Sea: Fish Story by Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula’s Fish Story is an intense and multifaceted photographic research project about the global shipping industry and its implications for labour, capital, and the environment. Through his critical realist approach, Sekula offers a nuanced visual analysis about “the forgetting of the sea”, that is the erasure of maritime labour from the realms of imagination (Lerner, 2019) and, as a result, the conversion of the sea in a blind spot, out of sight and beyond representation. In his view, the impact of globalisation becomes a new historical narrative. Photographer, writer, and filmmaker Allan Sekula, who grew up overlooking the Port of Los Angeles, examines how the ocean, once perceived as a wild frontier, has been transformed into a regulated space to facilitate the flow of goods and capital. Seas and oceans are thus places often excluded from the debate of the disciplines of space, immense territories perceived as empty deserts, but also objects of a special, often aggressive, kind of urbanization.