October 2–December 20, 2026
Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University
The Katharina Otto-Bernstein Screening Room, Lenfest Center for the Arts
New York NY 10027
USA
The Wallach Art Gallery presents Allan Sekula: Fish Story (1988–95), the magnum opus by the renowned American photographer, writer, filmmaker, theorist and critic who, with this work, sought to make visible the wide-ranging disruptions caused by containerized shipping and its impact across the globe. Fish Story offers meditations on maritime landscapes, mythologies of the sea, and the changing nature of cargo shipping as a way to explore the ways the neoliberal shift toward globalization plays out in the lives of workers and the seaports where they reside. It is the first time this seminal research-based photo essay is presented in New York in its entirety.
Fish Story is comprised of nine chapters, 105 photographs, 19 short texts written by Sekula, and two 80-image slide presentations that form complex and often contradictory relationships examining the disconnect between the historical and cultural narratives of the sea and the reality of contemporary containerized global shipping.
On loan from the Walker Art Center, this project explores the lives of workers in the international shipping trade and functions as a critique of the neoliberal economic policies in ascendance during the years of the project. Using a constellation of images taken on the ocean and in the port cities of Barcelona, Gdańsk, Glasgow, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, New York, Pusan (now Busan), Rotterdam, San Diego, Seoul, Ulsan, Veracruz, Vigo, and Warsaw, Sekula shows the unseen machinery of global commerce, where goods are packed into identical containers that disguise their contents, then travel by ships registered under foreign flags and are handled by low-paid workers operating with few regulations regarding workplace safety or labor rights. Other types of commercial ships, such as oil tankers and fishing boats, are also the subject of photographs and texts examining the transformations wrought by deregulation.
More than a commentary on globalization, the work is significant for its engagement with the dialectics of form, as Sekula’s work raises questions about the role of aesthetics in photographic history, which he eloquently discusses in his theoretical writings. Here, those theories materialize as a practical expression in the text panels and in the photographs themselves. The collection of images reference modernist compositions, signal the impossibility of originality, and are presented in chapters that employ carefully considered adjacencies that reverberate with precedents such as labor photography and paintings of ships at sea.
Known for critical approaches to documentary photography as a means to dissect and analyze class struggles, Sekula’s writings offer political and social analyses that expand the field of view of his photographic images. Developed as both a book and an exhibition, Fish Story is widely acknowledged as a watershed event in 20th-century conceptual photography.
About the artist
Allan Sekula was born in 1951 in Erie, Pennsylvania and later moved with his family to San Pedro, California in the early 1960s. He studied biology at the University of California, San Diego, and in 1974 received his MFA from the same institution. Sekula’s photography actively engages ideas around labor, capitalism, and Marxist theory, and poses pointed, nuanced critiques about social reality. Stylistically, he is known for his work with photography and its relationship to documentation—as a pictorial form, method of recording, narrative device, and medium of social engagement. Sekula was an esteemed teacher, serving as a member of the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts from 1985 until the end of his life.
