Visual Art

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

Port Portraits

by Ben Jacklet

For more than a decade, Allan Sekula has been photographing the major port cities of the world. Artistically, Sekula was drawn to the idea of cities such as Los Angeles and Hong Kong as "multiple borders," places rich with what he identifies as "the mixing and flowing and confusion of identity that people associate with life in the late 20th century."

Politically, Sekula was interested in the port as a material reminder of the sweeping changes brought by the shift toward a global economy--the increasing mobility of companies eager to exploit the cheapest workforce available; the pressure to convert working waterfronts into condominium view villages; the prevailing myth that because of laptops, large ships crossing the ocean loaded down with wood chips and oil have somehow been rendered obsolete.

Sekula's photographs--a lonely barge stacked with rectangular boxes moving slowly across an infinite sea, a pipe-fitter wearing coveralls in the engine room of a tuna boat, a group of men waiting outside a Polish unemployment office--portray a blue-collar waterfront which is increasingly obscured from public view in Seattle and other port cities. One hundred of his color photographs, accompanied by blocks of written text, are showing at the Henry Art Gallery under the title Fish Story.

It's unusual that, in a time when many museum shows have corporate logos attached to them, Fish Story is being sponsored by a coalition of labor groups, including four locals from the hard-core International Longshore Workers Union. The exhibition is part of a series of lectures, conferences, and curricula at the University of Washington and the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Seattle General Strike and the 65th anniversary of the West Coast Marine Strike (call 543-7946 for more information).

Fish Story is Sekula's third in a series of studies in advanced capitalism. With its fascination with the material goods of production, and its quotes from the infamous Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos, the show has a distinctly political edge. In one photograph, a woman identified only as "Pancake," a former shipyard sandblaster, scavenges copper from the waterfront where she used to work. In another, workers gather on the docks in Vigo, Galicia, Spain to protest the government's cutbacks in unemployment benefits. A block of text opens with a lament found on an engine room bulletin board: "They couldn't beat us so they'll unemploy us! God bless corporate America."

Sekula told me that his political approach derives partly from his fondness for the historical realism of 19th-century American fiction, the notion that "a precise description of the world as it is can be a suggestion of what it could be." Thus the ship becomes a political metaphor for absolute autocracy, both a prison and an engine of escape. Sekula updates the idea today with his portraits of 400-foot cargo ships with first-world captains from Norway and Great Britain and third-world crewmen from the Philippines and Vietnam. From a pure brute economic perspective, the goal of the multinational corporation is really quite similar to that of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick: in Sekula's words, "to secure a very cowed and submissive workforce." He adds, "Whether we're all willing to accept this idea of flexibility and dispensability is an open question."

As someone who spent five fish seasons working as a deckhand on board salmon boats in Southeast Alaska, I can relate to Sekula's idea of the ship as both prison and means of escape. In viewing the exhibition, though, I found myself wanting more of the sea, more jellyfish tentacles and battered wooden boats and creaking machinery, more of the natural tension that made deck work as intense as it was monotonous. It took me some time to resign myself to the rectangular containers of Sekula's port portraits, which carry about as much natural tension as a box-store shopping mall.

In fact, the title of Sekula's exhibition is misleading: really, there is very little documentation of the world of fishing. A more fitting title might be Container Story. As Sekula writes, "It is the cargo container, an American innovation of the mid-1950s, that makes the global system of manufacture possible."

And so it goes: the rectangular box is the way of the future. The men and woman offloading cheap consumer goods from Asia at Terminal 18 have never been busier, but it is a rare gillnetter at Fisherman's Terminal that is not for sale. The question is, who will go extinct next?

Rest assured that Seattle's longshore workers won't be going anywhere without a fight. Sekula's exhibition is a reminder that the urban waterfront has historically been the scene of not only rough work and raunchy play, but the occasional revolution as well. The artist notes that some of the greatest 20th-century images of rebellion are port images, from the Wobbly strikes to the radical political actions of the shipyard workers of Poland and South Korea in the '80s and '90s.

In Seattle, the longshoremen who are the heirs to the General Strike of 1919 are working under a contract due to expire this summer, setting the stage for a direct face-off between some of the city's proudest and most powerful workers and some of the world's savviest promoters of free trade. Sekula plans to shoot the next chapter to Fish Story on the docks of the Port of Seattle as the contract negotiations loom. It should make for a good chapter.