"Middle Passage", chapter 3, from Fish Story

Middle Passage is the third of nine chapters in Allan Sekula’s seminal photo series Fish Story. Historically, the term Middle Passage relates to the triangular trade routes in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. It is considered a time of in-betweenness, a precarious state of transition from the traditional tribal kinships to the new existences forged under duress for an itinerant oceanic slave nation.

Sekula’s Middle Passage begins with a panoramic view of the horizon, seen from the deck of a cargo ship, which slowly groans toward a wall of ominous clouds. The photographer stands, firmly planted, to one of the world’s largest cargo ships at the time, simultaneously contemplating the aggressive ocean ahead, and surveying the vast collection of cargo containers – which Sekula calls “the very coffins of remote labor power.” With this first photo, Sekula clearly and unequivocally ties the artistic symbolism of the sea to globalization, deregulated markets and neoliberalism.

Throughout Middle Passage, as well as the rest of Fish Story, Sekula employs text panels, which add a critical element to the documentary nature of his photographs. Fish Story develops into a work that blurs the boundaries between the academic essay, documentary image sequences, and cultural-commercial and sociohistorical research. The texts and photos correlate to various port cities around the world such as Hong Kong and Los Angeles, drawing unexpected literary, aesthetic and sociopolitical connections between these far-flung destinations and their inhabitants. However, through his numerous detailed close-ups and his specificity of text, Sekula grounds the work in the individual, thereby creating a stark discrepancy against the boundless issues of contemporary globalization and international commerce, which he takes as his larger subject.