On March 28, 2021, the 224,000-ton container ship Ever Given ran aground in the Suez Canal and cut off traffic in the shipping corridor for several days. The crisis soon became international news, as Lloyds of London estimated that the blockage had stopped some $9.6 billion in trade each day.
This may have been an exaggeration for the sake of the insurers who were all about to sue each other—consumer goods companies hurt by COVID used the six-day incident to justify long-term price hikes—but the story seemed to resonate with meme makers in an outsized way as well. It was a profound reminder that the abstract monolith of global capitalism sits upon an old and mysterious structure, accountable still to the follies of man and natural tides. Kind of like season two of The Wire.
Now, two and a half years later, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has just opened an exhibition of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, a project that touches on all these themes as it documents the oceanic shipping industry through photographs and essays. Sekula conceived Fish Story as both a book and a show, and the Walker’s staging marks the first time the work has been shown in its entirety in the United States in two decades.
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Sekula captured the raw material for Fish Story’s nine chapters between 1989 and 1995. He traveled from the Port of San Pedro in his native Los Angeles to South Korea, Scotland and Poland, where he captured welders at the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. “What one sees in a harbor is the concrete movement of goods,” he writes in one of the work’s text sections. “This movement can be explained in its totality only through recourse to abstraction. Marx tells us this even if nobody is listening anymore.”
If that all feels heavy handed, the photographs give the impression that it’s impossible not to notice such obvious metaphors while observing the lines of profound sea transport. There is The rechristened Exxon Valdez awaiting sea trials after repairs from 1990, one year after the infamous oil spill. Someone has used a label maker to distinguish his ear protection with the phrase “I CANNOT BE FIRED… SLAVES ARE SOLD.” Then there is the image of the shipping containers that have been ravaged by the desert. From the press materials I’m not quite certain what happened there, but do I really need to know? On a literal level?
The Walker acquired Fish Story in 2013 when the gears that turn our economy were a little less obviously in need of lubrication. Their foresight in collecting it, and their wisdom in staging it now, is a credit to the institution.
“Allan Sekula: Fish Story” is on view at the Walker Art Center through January 21, 2024.