On a first viewing of Allan Sekula’s photographs one is struck by their luminescence: cool-toned images that seem to give off a heated light. Whether it’s the deep blue of the sea, the indigo of a shipping container, or the soft shade of well-worn denim, the imagery of Fish Story forms a captivating narrative of the world of global trade, dissecting our imaginations and manipulations of the sea. The work illuminates an urgency around hotly relevant contemporary conditions of our relationship to oceans and the way their vastness shapes our societies. Sekula, whose project lasted for over a decade, navigates the complicated environs of a globalizing world and aims to show us the inherent awkwardness of the shipping industry’s containment of behemoth spaces. First presented in the early 1990s as a series of gallery installations, this critical work has now been brought into print by MACK Books.
When we look at photographs we see the way light plays on a scene, and bear witness to a moment distant from ourselves. Shadows and highlights force the eye to move. Situations are gleaned. But less often, when we see an image within the context of, say, the bizarre and brutalist structures of globalization, the eye strains to the edges, looking for more information. Which companies operate these vast fleets of cargo ships carrying our commodities across thousands of miles? What is it like to weld steel plate in a shipyard’s metal shop? Fortunately, Sekula provides a rich textual backdrop to his photographs in Fish Story. Like an exhibition catalogue, this book is part collection of academic and poetic texts written by the artist, and part photo essay exposing the hidden lives and spaces surrounding shipping ports. Each image carries the feeling and knowledge that the sea surrounding these spaces and individuals is vast, mysterious, and forever beguiling. Meandering through Sekula’s writing, a deeper portrait takes form, revealing the philosophical and logistical loci of global consumption. Fish Story is a foundational text for an inquiry into how the sea exists in our contemporary conceptions of the world, and how the spatial logic of the oceans has continued to act as a site of intense conflict, geopolitically, financially and artistically.
The word spring uses almost everything that the mouth can do, from front to back. It hisses the S, shuts it up with pursed lips and then explodes it with the P, releases the flowing RIN with the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, and closes the word from the top of the throat with the guttural G. It is fun to say, a roller coaster ride for the mouth, and it has been said almost unchanging for many thousand years. But not until the last few hundred years has it meant simply a season of the year.
And so it is with cookbooks. We could look up that recipe online, but there’s an intangible joy about pulling a book from the shelf and finding a page smeared with tomato sauce and annotated with scribbles in the margin. It might be anachronistic, it probably doesn’t make financial sense, it certainly won’t taste better but in that moment it just feels right.
In this novel, which teems with lives, the versions of their friendship in which those errors didn’t occur seem to exist alongside the versions that did, and these alongside relationships with various partners, children, siblings, parents and colleagues. Reading it, I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found in all the echoing corners of the expanding universe.
With her third novel, Lost and Wanted, Freudenberger takes another impressive plunge into a different sort of foreign culture: theoretical physics. In doing so, she joins a select group of novelists — including Richard Powers, Alan Lightman, Barbara Kingsolver, and Allegra Goodman — who travel across literature's borders into science, writing what has been called fi-sci, as opposed to sci-fi.
Like all architecture, abandoned and ruined spaces are animated by what people want from them. They can be massive economic boons or cynical attempts to cloak a neighborhood’s rapid socioeconomic transformation. They can also be powerful symbols and drivers of community engagement.