Author:

Abstract:

Allan Sekula. Collective Sisyphus draws a straight line between Fish Story (1989–95) one of the artist’s seminal photographic essays and his last project Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (2010–13). Along this trajectory, we find Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/98) and Lottery of the Sea (2006). In all these works Sekula laments the loss of the sea due to a global economy that favors a connected world. Sekula’s work will be remembered as one of modern photography’s greatest efforts to erect a monument – a far from grandiloquent one – to the cosmopolitan proletariat. Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was a well-known critic of photography before he bequeathed us a body of work celebrated for its complexity and sophistication. The publication of his book Photography Against the Grain (1984), undoubtedly his most emblematic manifesto, dismantled the myth of photography as a universal language. In the following decades, his documentary practice became obsessed with the corporeal, material and local conditions of capitalist production. For him, the maritime space was the matrix of the world we live in. Curated by Hilde Van Gelder, Anja Isabel Schneider and Carles Guerra