Allan Sekula

Details the catastrophic effects globalization has wrought on the ship, truck and train industries. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. At a moment when collective bargaining rights are under attack in the United States, and China continues to bow to foreign pressures to prevent such rights from being granted at all, this film asks: Is capitalism the Trojan horse that turns on its inventors?

Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.”…

Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.”…

Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.”…

Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.”…

Part History Channel, part visual diary, and part mesmerizing abstraction, Allan Sekula’s video, A Short Film for Laos, 2006, takes the measure of day-to-day life in what the narrator describes as “the most bombed place on earth.”…

Iconoclast photographer and documentarian Allan Sekula unfolds a series of variations shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries around two of his major obsessions: globalization and the sea. In this rumination on the sea as a "primordial source of sublimity," Sekula explores a matrix of narratives--Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors and displaced populations--and rejects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith's notion of the seafaring life as a form of gambling.

Documenting the opening of Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Gala presents an idiosyncratic ethnography of the revellers, posers, workers, and valets who move in the building’s orbit. Approaching the spectacle through its peripheries, Sekula offers a wry study of LA’s equivocal identity.

Tsukiji is a “city symphony” film of sorts, dedicated to the largest fish-market in the world, and one of the last surviving proletarian spaces in Tokyo. A film about cutting in a double sense, it harkens back to a moment of intersection of modernism and social realism, evoking the ghost of the left-wing Japanese novelist of the 1920s and 30s, Takiji Kobayashi, author of Kani kosen (The Factory Ship) and an early victim of Japanese fascism. —Allan Sekula

Sekula's final video investigates the recent rise of contemporary transnational art fairs. While filming the 2004 Miami-Basel Art Fair, Sekula aimed to expose the utter inequity in the luxe-studded art world.

A rarely shown early video performance, originally produced as a companion piece to a photo novel about working in a pizza restaurant. The structure is that of live television, an empty studio with two cameras and a switcher, no editing after the fact. Two cooks try to reproduce the gestures and banter of their work minus the ingredients and utensils of the kitchen. This is labor performed as madcap talky pantomime, without capital. One of their lines goes back to the anarcho-syndicalism of Laurel and Hardy.