Allan Sekula: Fish Story

by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh

American artist and writer Allan Sekula spent seven years photographing harbors and port cities around the world. Starting out in Los Angeles and San Diego, he traveled as far as Korea, Scotland, and Poland, photographing the prosperity, poverty, and political powers that continue to play out in major port cities across the world. The result was Fish Story, a seven-chapter illustrated tomb with more than 900 color photographs, that questions what remains of our port cities in the wake of a globalized economy.

Genres: Photography, Art

Paperback

First published December 31, 1998

About the author

Benjamin Heinz-Dieter Buchloh is a German art historian. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Orlane · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent photographer

[Dante]

“The weird origins of Korean shipbuilding in the 1970s can be traced in part to the purchase of plans from bankrupt Scottish yards on the River Clyde. With the second Industrial Revolution repeating itself on the shores of Mipo Bay, a number of unemployed Glasgow shipwrights migrated to Ulsan. This new planetoid within the solar system of late capitalism sustains a solitary moonlet of its own: a “Scotch Pub” in the foreigners’ bar district of Ulsan, across the street from the shipyard, and next door to “Bar Romance.”

What I’d do for a drink in that pub…

[Patricia L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! Look at it if you are at all interested in shipping containers, ports, people and the economy.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not without interesting material, both textual and photographic, but deeply confused and confusing in an unfortunately typical post-modernist manner. I saw an article about the book that praised it for “visualizing globalization, intertextuality, and critical realism” - in other words, just a bunch of academic concepts thrown at the wall. There is much genuinely to be said about globalization in relation to the sea, but for this crowd, a bunch of tags is enough, and eliminates the need to actually say anything coherent. There are quite a number of essays about the book available online, and every single one that I looked at was heavy on “theory” and International Art English, in keeping with Sekula’s own practice.