"Collecting, Socialism and the Sea:" A Contextual Analysis of Allan Sekula's Ship of Fools / The Dockers' Museum (2010-2013)

The research is part of a larger project that aims to analyze and contextualize Allan Sekula’s last artistic project, Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010-2013). Broadly speaking the work consists of two lines of inquiry:

         Ship of Fools consists of a set of photographs made by Allan Sekula during his voyage on the ship the Global Mariner (1998-2000). This vessel was used for a transnational solidarity and information campaign initiated by the global union ITF (International Transport Workers Federation, setting up political actions in ports in 80 countries connecting local struggles of maritime workers but also reaching out to the larger momentum of alter-globalist protests at the turn of the last century. The Dockers’ Museum, for its part, consists of a heterogeneous ensemble of around 1200 artifacts. collected and purchased online via eBay between 2010 and 2013. A significant part of these artifacts are photographs stemming from a wide range of sources: press, vernacular, commercial, industrial, etc. Then there are small sculptures, toys, paintings, postcards, and vernacular objects in particular ways related to the life world of dockworkers. Part research project, part artists’ collection, it tries to construct an embodied iconography of waterfront labor. Sekula passed away before he could finish the project. Due to his untimely demise we are now left with a perpetually unfinished project. The starting point and principal goal for this dissertation is to seek to understand this uncharted, heterogeneous ensemble of images.

The research will focus on in-depth case studies of carefully selected key objects or clusters of objects that can be considered as representative for the larger corpus. The DS will combine an analysis of the objects at hand with close readings of Sekula’s larger visual output and extensive textual production dedicated to the history, aesthetics and politics of maritime economic space. The research considers his project Fish Story (1989-1995)–which exists in as the key temporal and thematic demarcation of the corpus. Fish Story can be regarded as the start of Sekula’s attention to the lifeworld of port workers and maritime space as a field of research. With regards to his oeuvre and the internal coherence between separate projects Sekula described, in 1998, what he considered as a larger montage principle. As he writes ‘there is a larger montage principle at work than that internal to any single work, or even book. Any retrospective look allows for that larger montage to emerge. This research will take this larger montage principle at face value and employ it as a methodological tool to suggest significant connections previous projects and writings and Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum but will also to allow new insights into his earlier work to emerge.