Fish Story
<p>Completed between 1989 and 1995, <em>Fish Story</em> saw Allan Sekula’s career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism’ reach its most complex articulation. Fish Story reconstructed a realist model of photographic representation, while taking a critical stance towards traditional documentary photography. It also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalization. A key issue in <em>Fish Story</em> is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the growing internationalization of the world industrial economy, with its effects on the actual social space of ports.</p> <p>The ambition of <em>Fish Story</em> lies both in its immense complexity and global scope and in its emphatic challenge to the dominant climate of postmodern theory and practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s. <em>Fish Story</em> occupies a pivotal place in a gradual shift, still nascent in the early 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation and cynicism to one of renewed radical engagement in the art world.</p>
Authors: Alan Sekula
Contributors: Laleh Khalili
Editors: Barbera van Kooij, Catherine Lorenz, Allan Sekula, Ina Steiner