good evening i'm very happy to uh welcome alan secular to the aaa i actually invited alan to give a talk in a conference uh many years ago and uh uh he uh couldn't do the conference at the last minute and it was a pity but it's now sort of some six years maybe six years later that he's here and i'm very happy about that i think when we normally think about photographers they tend to focus only on photography and it's very rare to find a photographer who writes so beautifully and so poignantly about the uh the subject of their work and i think this is one of the things that makes alan very unique and i think the other thing is that he has really focused very much on making certain invisible conditions visible by by focusing on the role and development of of uh capitalism and what he calls uh on the the the relationship between the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world through a series of uh projects most uh recently i think there have been three projects that have focused on this topic one was the the project uh sketches for a geography lesson which he did as an exhibition in 1983 canadian notes that really worked uh developed the the relationship between uh industrial landscapes and the the landscape of capital of money and banks in canada which was uh recently turned into a publication and of course fish story which is uh partially related to the the presentation tonight globalism's discontent and the return of the sea where he has focused instead of the stability of landscape more on the fluidity of seascapes and the world of of of large containers ships uh the idea of uh flags of convenience and in a sense uh the whole uh way in which uh capitalism um is uh is and globally and globalization moves around the world but actually looking at all these issues uh in a in a fantastically insightful and critical manner uh would you please join me in welcoming alan secular oh thank you motion it's a pleasure to be here uh i just got off the train from liverpool where i've been for three weeks so i have to say i'm suffering from a bit of culture shock which may have more to do with liverpool than with london let's uh take the lights down and last year bill gates the chairman of microsoft purchased winslow homers painting from the mid 1880s lost in the grand banks for the highest price ever paid for an american painting 30 million dollars it's one of three large-sized paintings that homer made in the 1880s depicting the lives and deaths of north atlantic cod and halibut and herring fisherman dory fisherman in the new england fleet and it struck me as strange and perplexing that bill gates would develop a taste for this painting because in a sense gates whole project entails the objective of never being lost of always being connected and of being connected globally one might say voraciously so and so there's a odd pathos to his desire to own a painting of a solitary fisherman trying to discern the schooner to which he would like to return in a fog bank which is descended and this in fact was a depiction of a calamitous occurrence that was quite common on the grand banks many dory fishermen would drift for days before dying of thirst or starvation or exposure when they were cut off from the ships from which they were dispatched you could almost say that homer's project in these heroic scale paintings was not dissimilar in a documentary sense from the photographs made 20 years later by lewis hine that is to say his effort was to reveal something of the actual conditions of work in this case a subject that was impossible to photograph by the means available at the time but which could be represented by drawing a painting and i began to speculate about gates's private desires in purchasing such a painting and of course i can't read his mind but i decided to think about the painting's point of view this odd suspended height above the swells which i think nonetheless allows us to infer a lower position the position of someone like the dory fisherman who at one moment can see when lifted high on the swell the horizon line or could see the horizon line if fog hadn't obscured it but at the next moment has plunged down into the trough of the wave and faces only the immediacy of water close at hand something related to the swimmer's point of view the ocean swimmer's point of view which varies with the swell and so i decided and unfortunately i can't illustrate this for you i decided to try to photograph mr gates's house on lake washington in seattle from the same point of view and i did that in early september i went out on a boat and went into the water for about a half hour at dusk using a underwater camera diver's camera and i photographed his house sometimes with the swell from passing boats which as it turns out take a kind of touristic interest in witnessing the luxury of gates mansion on the lakefront um can we bring the lights down again thanks and and so i thought that perhaps by by actually subjecting myself to a very mild and insignificant near case of hypothermia i could learn something about why gates would like this painting um i i suppose um what interests me in a way is how the sea is returned to the consciousness of late 20th century elites i produced the work fish story between 1987 and 1995 on the premise that the sea had vanished from the conceptual horizon of late modernity and now i think i have to revise somewhat that premise um if any two images are emblematic of the larger project of fish story which entails 96 photographs in a book sequence and 105 photographs in exhibition form and related texts of various kinds it would be these two photographs which i think are set up as a kind of implied diptych to suggest a movement between the classical space of the sea which is panoramic and the modernist space of the sea which emerges in the mid 19th century roughly coincident with the development of steam power for sea travel and that i believe is a space of the detail and what in effect these two photographs show you are the kind of relationship between a contemporary container vessel in mid mid passage across the atlantic and the device that measures the list of the vessel um an inclinometer and what interested me then is this tension between the panorama and the detail but also the way in which the panorama here um entails an imposition of a terrestrial uh centrally perspectival ground plan similar to the tile floors found in cinquecento italian renaissance paintings the imposition of that ground plant upon the surface of the sea a kind of tourist terrestrialization of the sea and and that connected for me to the idea that the fluidity of the sea was in effect being being erased by a new fixity of transport routes and that the land in fact become at least the land as a site of production and become much more fluid with late modernity and with uh capitalist notions and programs of global manufacturing as far as the photo on the left goes uh what interested me is the relationship between the the spatial measure the fact that we're looking at it essentially five degrees of an arc uh or of a circle uh and yet we can also transpose this or trans transcoded into a temporal measure as if the bubble of the inclinometer with the ship traveling on the circumference of the earth three and a half days into its voyage so in some ways what i'm what i'm interested in is is taking spaces that appear abstract or appear connected to abstract logics of commodity flows and you know financial distance let's say from the world of utility and kind of material processes and then somehow approaching these these subjects photographically in such a way that they they they they take on a new materiality at another level in in canadian notes earlier work from the mid-1980s i tried to look both at arthur erickson's bank of canada building in ottawa and the industrial space of nickel mining in sudbury in northern ontario and um i suppose what amused me about this juxtaposition um which is perhaps as emblematic as the pairing that i've tried to show you from fish story is that these found these uh foundry workers or or smelter workers are appear to be at leisure while the process proceeds seemingly automatically though in fact what we're seeing is only an interval between their their their own labor and uh and what you see in the uh photograph of this workers lounge at the bank of canada is the um the impressions uh uh of of the uh the sitting workers uh who've gotten up from their coffee break and in fact in a print of the photograph you can see that there are cigarette burns in the naga hide furniture from the hasty putting out of a smoke on the return to the computer data processing work and then there's the nice fact that these red naga hide chairs reflect in the window in such a way that the houses of parliament appear to have taken on the look of red square um so back to fish story for a moment um so so one thing i tried to to photograph in in fish story particularly in the in the chapter that that deals uh with with the what i call the middle passage the borrowing that uh what is primarily in caribbean and african-american um phrase for the slave crossing uh and this is a passage on by container vessel from from new york city via norfolk virginia to rotterdam um and what interested me was that what interested me was the solitude of the work and certain residues of the age of sale the chief mate climbing the container stack to check the temperature of refrigerated containers the one daily act on the vessel that in any way evokes in the notion of scaling the mass to to handle the sails and then this sort of ghostly boiler suit in a passageway so that in many ways given the automation of contemporary ships and the scaling down of crews every every vessel is a ghost ship and to come back to the point about about the the the the relationship between um elite conceptions of the seas return and and another point which is more popular or if you want to put it in old-fashioned terms more proletarian views of the sea in the contemporary world i want to develop sort of a few comments about the reception of fish story the work was originally shown in rotterdam and then it traveled uh to to stockholm uh to the modern musee it went to scotland to glasgow to tramway and then finally to uh to two spaces in calais so all maritime cities of very different sorts no one in the united states was terribly interested in the exhibition and then finally i had i had two exhibitions one in 1996 at the santa monica museum of art um and then just this this past winter at the henry art gallery in seattle and by this time quite a number of people who worked in in in port uh trades uh had found out about the work oddly enough i mean a book published in germany you know an exhibition that was european but people heard about it and um and we're very interested in it and i was invited to exhibit in seattle uh by a kind of odd alliance of the art museum at the university of washington and um the department of labor studies which has the unique status of actually having a chair funded by retired dock workers it's called the harry bridges chair name for the famous uh west coast american trade unionist um and i think i have to focus here a bit i'm sorry what's that um so in seattle i had a unique uh experience of being able to actually uh talk with um an audience of of poor workers who came to the show with great interest and i i just wanted to sort of develop a kind of anecdotal perhaps only anecdotal insight into the differences between kind of class readings of of of the sea um early on in the exhibition i kept going up from los angeles i live in los angeles and i would go up repeatedly i had a kind of residency in seattle and uh at different times different groups of people would come through the show and and at one point i was uh present when a group of trustees younger trustees of the henry art gallery uh went through the exhibition many of them were are people in their 30s and 40s who made quite a lot of money in the computer industry and have retired essentially and they're no longer working in computer work because they've made a killing and the thing that really grabbed them in the exhibition was this one vertical triptych that intersects the middle passage and the structurally in the exhibition the middle passage sort of proceeds linearly and then there's a vertical triptych that cuts through it and what it represents is an intersection of the container vessel i was on and a drifting sailboat that happened to um have uh been caught and apparently rolled in a storm and um following the conventions of the sea the vessel i was on uh brought with great effort brought the uh drifting sailboat into the on onto its lee side the for the chief mate we saw earlier climbing the uh container stacks we seem to get all the the sort of exceptional dirty work on the ship which is sort of how you become a ship's master i suppose i descended and discovered the body of a dead american the name of the boat was the happy ending and its home port was anaheim which is all the more ironic because anaheim is not on the coast so the whole thing had an odd macabre disney-esque aspect to it and and this was the the element of the work that really interested these trustees that is the you know the lone sailor at sea uh kind of a kind of unusual calamity um oops i'm sorry excuse me for that that slides reversed but it's kind of vertiginous anyway it's even better that way i like it that way um it's good with that the best way to see this is three in a stack but um in any event um now the image that that haunted so this is the image that haunted uh let's say an upper class uh viewer uh in this in this particular instance but the image that haunted the port workers the dockers who came to the exhibition was this image of a robot terminal in rotterdam where the ship finally made port where the truck drivers who pick up the containers underneath the hammerhead cranes have been replaced by these automated vehicles so that image was haunting for workers and uh and then images like this you know uh the boson driving the forward winch as the ship moors in rotterdam an image that i hoped would suggest something of the the backwards and forwards cycle of you know oscillation of transatlantic labor and then this pair of ear protectors in the engine room with this caustic slogan produced with a dymo labeler i cannot be fired slaves are sold so there's very different readings of of the seas you know there's a sense of uh for people who work in in in port labor or in seafaring of a kind of violence that that exists on an everyday level it's grinding and routine occasionally calamitous always dangerous and then there's an elite sense of the sea as a place where uh disasters are intermittent sudden surprising and would call to mind heroic efforts and great tragedies and and of course this elite senses corresponds much more to the prevailing media representation of the sea um now if bill gates's uh uh purchase of winslow homers lost in the grand banks is one instance of the c's return i'd like to turn to another which is frank gehry's guggenheim bilbao and what i have to say about this building is is quite provisional and i i'm of course feel that i'm no more than an amateur and speaking of architecture but i have followed gary's work for some time gary figures along with um richard neutra in fish story although only in a fairly minor way but of course the the entire discourse of of of frank gehry's guggenheim bilbao is caught up with notions of the restoration of vitality to a derelict maritime city i mean this is a you know one of the first utterances one encounters in in the uh you know the voluminous literature on on on gary's project and um of course the building is both a ship and a fish of course it occupies the site of a former shipyard of hastieros espanoles uh of course it's thought that the building will in effect uh bring about a kind of revitalization of the of the riverfront of bilbao uh but there are a couple of other levels of meaning that interest me um and i set out to photograph the building last december and um and what i tried to do is give a wider angle on the on the building than is typically the case in architectural photography it's very common for photographers who represent gary's guggenheim to to climb the hill on the other side of the river sometimes even higher than i climbed but what i tried to do is show the degree to which the the relative affluence of the riverfront development is is uh is a kind of potemkin village behind which you have uh something that corresponds uh to the uh uh difficulties of economic life in the basque country so that space behind the railroad tracks interested me very much uh the other thing that that that interested me about uh gary's building is the the idea which i think is is quite pronounced it's perhaps most clearly articulated in the writings of kurt forster uh the idea that the the the um the building is a kind of token uh or totem is perhaps a more accurate word of of of the modern the modernity of the aerospace industry so the titanium is a metal associated with aircraft manufacture uh and and and it's as if a new metal has been introduced to a space of old metal of iron and steel of shipbuilding of heavy weights uh and and so the the ship and fish is also a kind of aeronautical uh phantasm uh and and if of course if one examines the semiotics of titanium one finds something rather peculiar for for example titanium is not used for aircraft skin manufacture it's it's used for it's used for um in in a lloyd form with steel for turbine blades because it allows turbine blades to function at high temperatures without the degradation that occur it would occur if they were made of steel only i know this because i was a chemical technician and i actually worked with the etching of titanium using hydrofluoric acid and it struck me as even more ironic that there is a container transfer terminal to the uh to the side of the museum and when i visited there were actually many containers full of hydrofluoric acid so i had to imagine an industrial accident in which the fumes would in effect dissolve gary's building um further the titanium is a metal which has come to come to be associated in with with high-end luxury consumer products german-designed cameras it's it's taken on a kind of luxury connotation that i think is worth considering when we see gary using the metal but beyond this there's also a way in which the building is a kind of light modulator that is it's introduced a new level of specularity uh and optical irritation into the boring tertiary palette of this backward industrial city so it's as if the uh the kind of optical uh interference that one associates with los angeles with its glare with its smog light uh is is it has has been helpfully uh in a kind of paternalistic north american gesture transplanted to the basque country now i know that it's it's been the case that the building has been adopted very enthusiastically uh by people in bilbao and uh has taken on yet other connotations but but um it seems to me that there's an interesting kind of ambivalent uh maritime uh set of associations with this building it cannot be holy it's it's organicism it's vitalism something that kurt foster's spoken about its fishiness uh also has to has to has to have a kind of transcendental and anti-organic component and that that aspect i think uh is is associated with the titanium cladding of the building i found it difficult to photograph and decided that that i would wait i would take a lesson from claude lorraine and wait until the sun had dropped so that the whole tonality of the image would shift downward um and actually this is this is kind of work in progress i'm really trying to think about uh the relationship of of gary's structure to to much more primitive structures you know metal structures like this this uh you know sheet metal clad fishermen or sheet metal period uh fisherman's hut in the uh loire valley in france along the and river um oh that's interesting a little bit of liverpool moisture boiling off the slide there all right um oh sorry i've just gotten flustered you'll have to excuse me all right give me one second to read all right all right third example of the seas return the uh the making and re distribution of the film titanic by james cameron what the photograph on the uh on the on on your left depicts is the the set for titanic in papua on the baja california coast about uh 50 miles south of the u.s mexican border and right what um 20th century fox did was to build the world's largest freshwater filming tank in papua hoping to take advantage of cheap mexican uh labor both in building the set and in in the technical jobs of film production the plan is to make as many as 20 films on this site first of which was titanic popola is a small fishing village ironically it has no running water even though they have this gigantic tank of fresh water and in fact the efflux of fresh water into the tide pools below the cliff on which the set was built caused wrecked havoc with the uh uh the eco ecosystem uh of of of mussels and other shellfish uh that were the mainstay of of the fisherman's livelihood and what you see here on the right these are all of these diptychs that you see are essentially consecutive frames and so i've moved a few paces to my right and i'm looking down the slope uh from the set uh at uh two of these fisher folk cooking mussels on an open fire and these are the characteristic shanties in which they live on the right is another aspect of the of the coastal zone along the u.s mexican border on the pacific coast a gigantic hyundai container factory most 80 percent of the world's containers are manufactured in china but there is a large factory in mexico largely building containers for the north american market and what i photographed here is the is the factory and then moving slightly uh uh a wall of an abandoned building a partially ruined building with a trucker's graffiti and the trucker's graffiti is in this interesting trump lawyer i think it's going to be hard for you to see here but um the truck sort of bends around the corner of the wall so that if you look from a 45 degree angle it would be in uh proper perspective uh though it has some odd quasi-cubist aspects as well and it's a fairly accurate representation of a refrigerator truck with with this odd name on the roof chase spiro which is a very droll mexican joke there's an actor a comedian on mexican television named chespirito which means little shakespeare so uh chespiro is big shakespeare and it's apparently the sort of the brag of a of an outlaw trucker who's shipping marijuana from mazatlan north to the american border so the graffiti relates to a whole culture of corridos and sort of gangster songs that are very popular in northern mexican border culture so i was trying to look at these you know the the titanic operation of 20th century fox in in in relation to this other industrial presence and this work is called dead letter office and it's one of them one of several sequels to fish story where i'm looking at maritime space but trying to examine other other spaces i was very keen to do something on this on this border zone uh it was commissioned for a large uh by now well actually uh multinational north and south and latin and central american exhibition which took place between tijuana and san diego i refused to show my work in the u.s and insisted that it be shown in tijuana which was great great fun this is just a reminder and any of them uh all right let me go forward here um and one thing i did in in in mexico was to look at and now i'm going to i'm going to talk about the uh the dimension of of globalism's discontents and particularly the the kind of certain kind of militants that i think is beginning to emerge um these are these are workers for hyundai subcontractors on the left a worker in an ensenada shipyard ensenada is the mexican port city about 80 miles south of the border and on the right a worker for a steel steel cutting firm uh working for hyundai subcontracting to hyundai uh and the group of workers in the picture on on the right are are signing authorization cards for an independent union so they're attempting to break away from the mexican ruling parties uh state-controlled unions uh and and this has been a key side of of of class conflict in the on the northern mexican border the formation of these independent unions the workers on the right are at risk of arrest uh they can be arrested without any kind of habeas corpus rights uh they can wait in jail for weeks before being charged uh nonetheless as you can see they've brought children with them there you can see the shoes of a small child none of them had pens they had to borrow pens in order to sign these authorizations so it's it's a quite moving uh and and and risky situation in many respects and and uh i felt privileged privileged to be able to document it as it turns out this particular group of workers failed in their fight but there's another group at another company also working for hyundai that have continued to push their cause forward so this is a dimension of of what i've what i've been looking at um and uh two more pictures from this project dead letter office which perhaps bring bring us closer to my melvilian source for the title which is the short story bartleby the scrivener bar if you know the story you know that uh at the very end bartle bartleby's boss imagines that his truculence and catastrophic decline is the outcome of his having having worked for a period of time at the american post office's dead letter office and that the sheer psychic uh violence of of witnessing you know and handling letters that never reached their sender drove him to his the state his final state um so so here's the titanic sort of sinking into its earthen grave i suppose for me a way of of suggesting that the film has in a way nothing to do with the sea that it um as much as the sea returns it's a kind of tamed sea you know there's no weather there's no um i mean there's there is a sense of the of the deluge below decks but but uh beyond that it's it's it's a fair rather terrestrial film um so so i like this idea of of a grave for the ship or a grave and i like the idea that the the uh the the lighting stands uh were like the the skeletons and jason of the argonauts you know these sort of skeletal figures and then on the right a a coffin factory in tijuana small shop making coffins some for the american market some for the mexican market and the workers have figured out a kind of erotic uh solution to their daily confrontation with thanatos and so they they've um they've covered the wall with pinups sort of rather chaste and robust mexican style pinups and uh and you notice that there's a pile of shredded paper on the right well it turns out that um the shredded paper is used to pad you know the the body in the coffin uh usually encapsulated in a poly poly film layer so one has to imagine that these pin-ups might well be shredded and provide a kind of kind of bed for the deceased um so so in a way was it was i i was taking my my metaphor of the cargo container as the coffin of remote labor power quite quite uh seriously here but i was also thinking of a very interesting mexican film from 1933 a film by arkiti boiler called la mujer del puerto the woman of the port which is a kind of translation of a guitar short story set in marseille to veracruz with all the all sorts of mexican carnivalesque editions so um it's a bit of a homage to that film by arkiti boiler which stars andrea palma who's the sometimes described as the marlena datrick of mexico um oops i'm doing it again excuse me um all right um i'm now i'm now getting to the work uh that's that's in liverpool and um i should say that what i did in liverpool was was to take a work i made last summer uh called freeway to china and uh and and and and expand it for liverpool so what i what i did was to imagine a connection between liverpool and los angeles um it's fairly common when one thinks about maritime history to connect liverpool in new york and they're also very profound architectural linkages between liverpool and new york you know there was a park on the other side of the river that inspired central park uh for example um and uh of course there was you know the the two ports were connected through trade and passenger travel um the original work uh last the summer before last i showed it at the at the new getty center uh in the in the small galleries at the getty research institute um and i i was uh trying in a way to to uh suggest that that that the implicitly what i was trying to suggest is that all the attention to the two billion dollar richard meyer getty center on a strictly financial level sort of paled in comparison to the five billion dollars being spent to build new infrastructural improvements uh leading to the ports of los angeles and long beach something called the alameda corridor and that this was in in on a kind of base material level the the the um the industrial counterpart to the grandiosity of of uh richard meyer's cultural theme park or palace on on the hill um so i went down to the port and i you know i'd been photographing there for quite some years but what i looked at is the expansion of the port and i'm just going to read you some of the text from the work which these prints are fairly large and the text is sort of placed on the wall with you know transfer letters um this is from the main text today the relationship between the sea and the land is increasingly the opposite of what it was in the 19th century sites of production become mobile while paths of distribution become fixed and routinized factories are now like ships they mutate strangely masquerade and sometimes sail away stealthily in the night in search of cheaper labor leaving their former employees bewildered and jobless and cargo ships now resemble buildings giant floating warehouses shuttling back and forth between fixed points on an unrelenting schedule the contemporary maritime world of offers little in the way of reassuring and nostalgic anthropomorphism but surrenders instead to the serial discipline of the box the cargo container and american innovation of the mid-1950s transforms the space and time of port cities and makes the globalization of manufacturing possible the container is the very coffin of remote labor power bearing the hidden evidence of exploitation in the far reaches of the world the combined ports of los angeles and long beach are the biggest in the americas and now rank third or fourth in the world in container volume massive public investments in new rail lines bridges and container and coal export terminals costing more than three billion dollars will more than triple the cargo capacity of the port of los angeles there's another two billion but it's more complicated in its relation to all of this uh these infrastructure projects are largely hidden from public scrutiny and the port remains unrecognized and invisible in this sense the port of los angeles is the very exemplar of the post-modern port vast functionalized tracks for container operations built upon ever-expanding landfill far from the metropolitan center no one would describe los angeles as a maritime city a port with a present and an optimistic future but oddly indifferent to its own past plans for los angeles port expansion were based on optimistic projections of continued manufacturing growth in east and south asia the recent asian economic crisis has called these projections into question falling currencies may raise hopes of export-driven recovery on the backs of impoverished workers but the complex global logistics of the system creates new blockages and economic sinkholes the balance of trade slips radically with many containers returning to asia from los angeles holding nothing but air crisis or boom with its low wages south china is now a primary industrial hinterland for the port of los angeles the delirious or cynical official claim that the sunken rail lines of the new alameda corridor will promise promises to create promise to create seven hundred thousand jobs both rings hollow and begs the question where as one los angeles dock worker put it gazing out at the rising ball work of pier 400 dredged up from the bottom muck of the outer harbor pretty soon they'll just drive the containers over from china so so the work is called freeway to china and based on that wonderfully ironic comment that i overheard um let me let me just read you the caption to the photograph on the on the left the teal the name of a ship birthed at pier 300 after unloading two of four german cranes transported across the indian and pacific oceans from a construction site in abu dhabi on the persian gulf where they were manufactured by filipino and other south asian migrant laborers belgian owned the teal is registered in the netherlands antilles a pervasive legal ruse that permits the hiring of cheaper foreign crews orange and blue are the utopian colors of southern california the color of the region's first great agricultural export product and the color of the water stolen and transported 200 miles by aqueduct to make that product grow irrevocably connected to larcenous beginnings these complementary colors were adopted by the los angeles-based oil giant unical which nowadays builds for a lucrative future in burma orange is also the color of rust and curiously enough of rust-resistant paint as well orange is also the color of the fires of hell if unless you read milton who imagined otherwise blue is the color of the sea in liverpool orange and blue taken together mean different things especially on july 12th when the orange order takes to the streets at the tate gallery on albert dock any day of the year rain or shine orange and blue are architect james sterling's way of saying that things are looking up after the fires of the tox death riots of 1981 taking us back as it were to the pop optimism of the swinging 60s so what i wanted to do was write a caption that would explode basically you know sort of sounds like a regular photographic caption and then it goes somewhere else and this is the german engineer supervising the unloading of the cranes and unfortunately i didn't get his name and then mason davis uh former uh shipyard machinist and the shop steward on the job who's working here as a welder in precarious employment and he told me that this was the first real work he'd had over in a year and as my caption says later i tried to find him track him down to give him a print of this photograph he'd moved off to new york in search of work and i couldn't find him um the uh on the left yuri smolin a russian sailor from moscow uh loading more orange paint on the ship uh it's not orange enough for them it's always got to be repainted uh and then uh mason davis and a colleague loading gas canisters onto the ship to begin the process of cutting loose the bracing for the cranes um and then uh uh on the left uh louisa gratz uh she's a president of a longshore dockers local in actually warehouse workers local but part of the longshore union uh in los angeles and she's just negotiated with with ship owners uh at a terminal to after a wildcat strike action in support of australian dock workers and i'll say more about that later and then on the right a picture called a thousand trucks and these are this is a strike of mostly latino immigrant truck drivers who haul containers to and from the port of los angeles and they're trying to uh have be recognized as wage workers even though they're classified as independent owner operators and uh their their slogan for a time was very funny though it has to be translated from american uh it was uh or from from i should say from spanish and american it was uh w2c 1099 no and the w2 is the tax form you fill out if you're if you're a wage worker and the 1099 is the form you fill out if you're self-employed uh so they they were they were removing their trucks from the waterfront this is out by the fontana steel mill which you may know about from mike davis book city of quartz they're parked between the demolished steel mill which was sold to the people's republic of china in parts and reassembled and the new san bernardino county jail which is the new growth industry in that part of california it's about 80 miles from the port it's a very interesting job actually they're actually in the print you can tell that that little building with the neon is a bail bonds office all right so port of los angeles is is really a port with with with no sense of its maritime identity as i said earlier uh that had a lot to do with the fact that the port was quite distant from the the city center so in this early 1870s photograph you can see that you just have a few rocks piled up and somebody's helpfully written san pedro california and then you have some ships at anchor about a mile offshore and then from the 20s from a chamber of commerce booster pamphlet an attempt through juxtaposition to suggest proximity between the port and the city center but it's very much the the the opposite condition from the condition of liverpool uh where the city center is is is a kind of grand statement of kind of mercantile presence on the waterfront um now the route to liverpool from los angeles for me went by way of australia so it gets even more complicated because in last year um australian uh the australian government tried to break the australian dock workers union and they they trained paramilitary operatives many of the veterans of the australian sas and uh in in dubai uh to operate uh cargo handling equipment and came in and and uh basically had a kind of police and military takeover of the ports dock workers around the world responded to this and particularly dog workers on the west coast of the u.s who have a sentimental tie to australia because harry bridges their leader in the 1934 strike which allowed them to organize and end the brutally exploitive casual labor system that had preceded that fight uh was was bridges was australian he was an australian seafarer who emigrated in the 20s to california and uh and so here's a picket in los angeles turning around an australian ship the columbus canada uh sending it back to australia with its containers full of things like mutton and uh costing ship owners about 10 million dollars so i made this the scale is off here because of the slides but the the picture on the left is much smaller and the picture on the right is much bigger and uh and and what i wanted was this kind of double diptych a vertical diptych with a partial frame one and a third frames with the focus pulled suggesting an action that was having an effect in the antipodes and and then the image of the picket a kind of more traditional sort of political journalistic type photograph um now this then linked to the fight of the liverpool dockers who had been sacked 500 of them sacked in 1995 and who fought for 28 months and finally had to give up um and when i was invited to show in the liverpool biennial i i i was delighted because i one i'd wanted to liverpool was one of the cities that i want had wanted to make central to fish story and wasn't able to for reasons of plane tickets and train schedules i was able to go to glasgow and newcastle but but not to liverpool and and then i i'd followed the struggle of the liverpool dockers and in fact had screened ken loach's film on their fight made in the middle of the fight of four dock workers in the west coast and the u.s on three different occasions in seattle in berkeley and in los angeles and i was very touched by the fact that uh that the dock workers had actually flown up to berkeley from los angeles to see the film before it was even possible to arrange a later screening in la and um so i was very moved by that and that that sort of led to the conditions of my showing fish story in seattle with the support of the union and so on and it seemed like coming full circle to do something with the liverpool doctors but what what what happened was i i finally made it to liverpool in july and it was just at the time when the film that showed recently on channel 4 was released and this is a film co-written by these former dock workers and and so they basically came up with a script through a writer's workshop working with jimmy mcgovern and irvine welsh and and so they've they've been transformed really from from dock workers into people who are doing something like what artists do or what what writers do or perhaps what architects do which is making things with with cultural import and uh this this diptech is is for me the structuring pair of images for the for the work now uh the picture on the left is called ship spotter and it's taken in new brighton and it's a man i have no reason to believe he's a dock worker but he's clearly interested in ships and he's looking at a canadian container vessel coming into the port i was very happy that it was orange and uh and then on the right um doctors at their at their uh their um their meeting place which is in a catholic church in liverpool uh it's a temporary quarters for them they've just bought a nightclub in the center of the city which they're converting into their new center for the initiative factory which is their their effort to keep going and retain their solidarity and be involved in cultural work and they're listening to a bbc radio program uh call-in show with people commenting on the film so they're they're involved in a kind of cultural discourse here and so it's called docker's listening this photograph they're very intense people are calling in some people are complaining about the use of the f word other people are calling in saying we should have been more militant you know to me and so on um and then uh two dockers uh former dockers uh marty size in the rear and mickey thai in the front looking through the fence at the seaforth container facility uh the place where they used to work and uh it's a very you know kind of depressing it's very generous of them to take me there because it's it's hard for them emotionally to go to this place because they they're they're outlawed there they can't go in and uh you know they they have a this lingering proprietary sense of their own jobs and at one point mickey said to marty uh uh look marty there's your machine as a front loader you know container handling machine was roaring through the stacks of containers and i thought yeah well wood that it was his machine but it isn't and then this is the headquarters of the transport and general workers union in in uh liverpool which failed to support the liverpool dockers so i made this picture called speak here and you can see this wall you know between the uh the union office and you know the various slogans the image of bill morris the head of the tng and so on had the transport and general workers supported the liverpool dockers the outcome of their fight might have been different oops sorry did it again and then um how am i doing on time i think i should finish up here um the last two pictures from liverpool again the scale is off um i'm sorry the slide on the on the left is reversed so you you've got ireland uh floating over there somewhere near france or holland is it possible to reverse that slide or would that be too difficult to do i'm sorry i'm being finicky uh the um just pop it up and twist it around um the the scale of these pictures again is is completely off the the picture on the left is quite large it's about three by six feet and the picture on the right is just uh 16 by 20 inches so it's a little picture in it um and uh and actually the the picture on the right is on the left yeah okay you get the ideas it's approximate i'm sorry uh uh the picture on the left is is taken at albert dock and it's uh this weather map that granada television i think still uses uh and like this it's it's a group of mostly boys but one girl who happens to be in mid leap uh she's jumping from somewhere like portsmouth heading out to the very beginning of the channel uh and uh and and they've they've swung they're sort of you know this hot summer day and they're just sort of rowdy kids swimming across the dock at some peril because their boats roaring around uh and and then they're they're about to climb up the dock and go into a candy store and a sweet store sweet shop and uh and pilfer these dripping wet kids pilfering candy and running through the crowd rather lackadaisically chased by the police an image for me of all that is you know that kind of proletarian energy and rudeness and and joy that i think is one of the great legacies of working-class culture in liverpool and then on the right um a portrait of john stanson a guard at the tape gallery liverpool and uh i'll conclude by reading the caption to that it's called portrait number three so this is queen of the the pirates on the left and uh on the right uh portrait three and here's the extended caption john stanson former merchant seafarer and dock clerk has worked as a guard at the tate gallery liverpool since its opening in 1998. anticipating the dismantling of the national doc scheme by the tories in 1989 he left the working docks for a more poorly paid job attending to the cultural renovation of the derelict liverpool waterfront he says thank god for the yuppies they're the only reason any of us have jobs an articulate and knowledgeable historian of the albert dock which he describes as the cape canaveral of its day he gives me a wry look and responds with a question when i ask why the specific history of the dock with its innovative hydraulic cranes and bonded warehouses is unrepresented at the merseyside maritime museum next door to the tape he says are you familiar with gramsci's idea of culture cultural hegemony okay i'll end there uh people will ask some questions yeah um do you have any questions maybe for ala i should apologize to those of you sitting over here and i don't think you could see the slides in germany is that the way it's oriented for the keysight presumes a view from the south of england um it is actually oriented east-west i mean if they had oriented it north south as a map literally with the north part of the object right in the north it would have put liverpool facing the key side um but the way it is there it assumes like like so much mapping and the representation of the british isles that the view is taken from above the southeast of england that's great yeah i hadn't i hadn't actually thought of that yeah i found it very disorienting i mean i don't have you know i don't have the sort of concept you know cognitive map of the british isles in my head in the way that i have the map of the united states in my head so uh probably you know in a way it was somewhat undercoated for me you know well another bookmaster fuller made a number of his his geodesic maps which tried to represent the world as a single massive ocean um rather than the usual mercator projection um and i think that it is actually very difficult for uh sort of land lovers as it were to get a sense of things like great circles and the curious way in which actually is you come towards uh someone like british isles from let's say canada uh it simply doesn't look like what it is on the usual projections the only person i know is sort of took notes this was anthony wedge with ben when he was minister of energy tony ben and he hung the map of britain upside down uh because he was dealing with a lot of nazi the oil oil and gas fields and it was just actually a better way to represent it about the kind of photography or the kind of the look of the photography that you end up making um and how you in a way you were talking about the difference between bill gates or the the trustees that came in and they liked the singular sort of heroic man and adventure kind of story picture as opposed to the images which were more about the other kind of working experiences at the sea and it it struck me that the pit the kind of look of the pictures that we were look we were seeing look i don't know how consciously or intentionally but they seem to come from they look the things that they looked at looked like to me most were pictures from kind of corporate annual reports of industry kind of just even the quality of the color of the container ships and the sea very clear very sort of even lighting that so you see the different colors very clearly and and how in how kind of intentionally part of the project that is in a way well uh i mean there's the odd picture that that i think could be in a corporate report like that long view of the of the ship but even the portraits of the workers you know with their hard hats on sort of smiling but you know they're they're part of a corporate force sort of they could be well i don't think anyone's really smiling except john stanson but that's the one that see what i like about that is that he looks a little bit like he's uh he could be some sort of executive and then you realize he's wearing a guards coat you know so i deliberately wanted i mean it's the sort of photo one would make of lewis biggs you know in front of the tape right i mean it's the director so i wanted to put him where the director would be for a certain type of photograph you know if the observer magazine was doing a story on the albert dock and they might have a photo like that but but here's this guy who's a real scouser and he's and he's a working class uh you know organic intellectual to boot and and uh so so a lot of times i'm i'm playing with that you know and and uh as for the color well see the the the maritime world has this reputation for anachronism so it's thought that it should be represented but monochromy is is really uh uh uncharacteristic of the maritime world once the paint industry and and the dye industries work out high chroma uh rust preventative paints you know the the basic palette of of the 19th century maritime world restricted color to the shipping company flags i mean british ships in particular because they were made from iron were typically painted black and then you have that bit of you know color from the from the the company pennant and the national ensign uh and and that that kind of monochromy i think pretty much characterizes uh ships into the 20th century and you start seeing color in the 20s and then after the second world war you get these distinctive corporate colors you know there's hyundai green and there's uh and now we have this kind of weird merger of ned lloyd orange and piano blue you know uh and so on but uh these are these are these are corporate colors and and to me one way of insisting on the contemporary of the maritime world is to is to represent it in color to show that you know to not and that's interesting because you sometimes find that people who work in ports prefer the nostalgic you know the image that corresponds to a certain image of pastness for them you know that's that's the aesthetically distanced image for them but then you get you get different readings i had interesting responses in liverpool in that respect one thing i did in liverpool which i didn't mention i'm i'm glad in a way that i remember remembered it now in the question period here is that um uh i did one thing i did in liverpool was i was very conscious of the way that these these biennials sort of drop in you know you get international artists who come in and uh in fact i saw a very very funny uh cartoon in a swedish art magazine this summer it showed a peasant in front of a bombed village and you know the village is sort of smoldering and there's a cnn crew there with the camera and the peasants saying what we need now is a biennial you know and uh so so what what i was aware of in the case of liverpool is that is that it's already a city with with a great capacity for self-representation and uh and i also knew that there were people there who had documented the doctor's struggle so i invited i invited a liverpool photographer dave sinclair to show with me and and and we got together you know i met him maybe my first day there and we went and had a drink and he came someone who comes from a waterfront neighborhood is you know five generations of dockers and his family and seafarers and uh he's very much representing the the he has a vision of liverpool i mean in his work since about 1980 he's been trying to to represent liverpool and he's one of a number of interesting photographers up there and he happens to work in black and white and uh and so i invited him to show and there's an interesting tension between his pictures and mine because he's showing the struggle as it was going on and he's got people at the fence looking through when when things are still being contested and um and then my my photo of mickey and marty is sort of after the fact he's rather more melancholic at this point and and i talked to one of the women of the waterfront who's part of the writers workshop during dorian mcnally one of the co-writers of of the doctors film and she she was she talked to me about that she said that she found my photo and she didn't think that any photo was going to touch her at this point that it's just people are through it they're trying to make their lives they're trying to keep an organization going but the scale got her scale did something and and the time element did something so so a lot of times what i'm doing with a caption is to locate the image in it in a particular temporal moment that might not be evident from the visual evidence itself and that's something that i think goes against the grain of of of the corporate representation because corporate representation is is has basically an investment only pardon my use of that term only in the moment you know the the the very next moment of accumulation it's neither long-term nor is it nor is it um historicized i think it's it's you know every every moment of if you see capital or if you see labor in a corporate photograph it's intended to be uh you know an image of a kind of endless present you know accumulative accumulative present uh and so i i like the idea of working close to that but then skewing it somewhat so how do you what's the relationship between the text then and the photographs because for example with the canadian notes i mentioned that the exhibition was in the 80s and then the book came up like a couple of years ago and how are you how are you developing this relationship between writing about the photograph and actually you know orchestrating the shoot itself well uh with canadian notes it's fairly simple i mean the the the exhibition had a reading table which i intended to be like a table where a small town bank or somewhere in the west of canada might negotiate a farmer's mortgage you know or foreclose a farmer's mortgage and there was a pamphlet on the table with a kind of simple gray cover and and that was the text of the work and then there were brief uh there was one text on the wall one extended introductory text and then brief very brief captions for the photos the book basically documents that there's nothing additional except for two critical essays one by gary dufour and another by john o'brien on the work um in the case of fish story the exhibition had a um the exhibition was bigger than the book and the book was bigger than the exhibition in this sense the exhibition included two slide projection pieces that are not included in the book because it each one would have required a full book to to document because each one had about 80 transparencies uh and then and then the book has uh a long essay on on the sea uh i know on the representation of the sea which is not part of the exhibition proper it's a second you know it's kind of art historical or cultural you know cultural studies text on the representation of the c and uh so so the relation between text there's always a relation between text and image and i see them as as absolutely parallel and no one has priority but uh but but the actual specific way in which they relate may vary with fish story i kept the the captions and the the sort of prose poem or short essay texts at a distance from the image sequences so you had to kind of walk around the room and find you know find the caption for a particular photo because i wanted people to to to encounter the image in in visual terms first and try to figure out what it what it was and and and perhaps appreciate some kind of montage relation between adjacent images and and begin to detect a kind of sequence and kind of flow and then see the captions and the caption list for me had a kind of poetic quality of you know kind of i mean this kind of lexical work that that list does that interests me and then there was this other prose poem text so there were various text elements coming in sort of on a second level of reading with this installation i decided to be go back and be much more direct caption next to the photo but short titles so each picture has a title which perhaps suggests either something about genre like portrait number one or or something allegorical like queen of the pirates uh and and and that for me is something i've resisted until now which is this kind of titling i felt it's it's it's risky it's it risks grandiosity and and editorializing about the work i you know i dislike allegorical titles in general but i decided in this case that there was something uh i mean this may seem silly but but there was something quite heroic about what the liverpool doctors and their families did you know and and i wanted to respect that and it seemed um i was drawn more and more to the model of corby and this and the scaling of the pictures and and so on and and uh and then there's the extended text below so so but these are all on the wall next to the photographs well i'd like to uh thank alan for the lecture i i think that uh in the context of of the school one of the things that is really special is this idea of trying to also show the situation and in a way the context of the work so often i think it was important what you were saying about the the photograph of the frank gehry and bilbao once sees really the object and the kind of aestheticization of the object and i think to see someone who is uh working on the idea of the preparation of of the work its tactics its strategies and then of course it's it's uh it's situational relationship i think it's it's particularly important in the context of what uh what happens in uh in architecture so like to uh thank you thank you thank you you