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Chapter https://i-model-h0use.com OneWrong Direction: Photography of Immigration and the American Dream Hyeongjin Oh Both the product and cause of a convergence, [image environment] is staged in terms that address the overlapping spheres of countermemory and aesthetics, as deployed in printed records and photographic renderings. This actual and virtual contact zone has deep-rooted investments, therefore, in various borderlands—differences or movements that are at once theoretical, practical, and political … [A] transnational attention to art and culture is fundamental to understanding the separate components of an environmental whole, insofar as to bring these elements into focus is to inaugurate a cultural scene of travel whose matter is the ‘unnatural coupling’ of photography and surrealism. That real or imaginary place of convergence constitutes the ‘shared image environment.’- Robert Tejada, National Camera[1] “Steerage” denotes the part of the ship where the helm of the vessel was located. After the eighteenth century, the helm was moved on deck, freeing areas under the deck for passengers. Afterward, the area that was sold as third-class passenger berths kept this name … Stieglitz did not acknowledge their individuality or any action of their livesthe area of the boat where they lodged—their environment—defined their existence ... The only identity allowed to them by the photographer was the name of the area where they slept … Most people, historians and lay alike, assume that ‘The Steerage’ is a picture of immigration to America … The present historian can use the image as an artifact to confirm a fact that disrupts preconceptions: Many people willingly left America.- Kate Sampsell Willmann, “Lewis Hine, Ellis Island, and Pragmatism”[2] The Steerage by American modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz is one of the most famous images of US immigration in the early twentieth century.- Chat GPT’s answer to my question, “what is The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz?”Figure 1.1. Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage, gelatin silver print, 33.3 x 26.5 cm, 1907. The Steerage (1907) by Alfred Stieglitz (Hoboken, United States, 1864~1946) is a famous modernist photograph in gelatin silver print, capturing passengers on the bustling transoceanic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II during Stieglitz’s five-month vacation from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Paris in May 1907 [Figure 1.1]. The image documents the ship’s third-class passenger section, known as the “steerage,” which Stieglitz, according to his memoir, accidentally stumbled upon during his aimless stroll from the first-class quarters.[3] Seen as an emblem of the early modernist movement in North America—second only to the Ashcan School of painting—The Steerage’s astounding photographic realism is evident from the gelatin silver print’s lustrous surface, rich tonal variety, tactile sensation emanating from the fine black-and-white grains, and the intricate play of focus that unfailingly captures the event’s authenticity on that very day.[4] Described as “another milestone in photography” by Stieglitz himself, the photograph’s significance arises from Stieglitz’s excellent knowledge and acumen about his camera device, an eye sensitively attuned to capturing photographable moments, and, no less importantly, the help of sheer luck.[5] Stieglitz’s primary focus was characteristically cubistupon reaching the ship’s upper deck and looking down at the steerage, he discovered “the most beautiful symmetry” from the vertically divided spatial structure between the upper-class American “nouveau riche” and the working-class immigrants below.[6] Imagine the moment of creation: Stieglitz draws a mental sketch of the completed frame as he fumbles for his Auto Graflex, calculating the composition, angle, source of light, his position, vanishing point, shutter speed, and the most difficult aspect on a moving ship, the aperture. At the image’s center, Stieglitz places the wooden bridge, reflecting the daylight of the mid-Atlantic and creating a visually imposing line from the lower left to the upper right corner on the opposite deck. This plane of glaring light, which stands out on the glossy print as the primary focal point, contrasts with the dimly lit lower deck, its rich tonal variety providing an illusory depth to the third-class sector. Further accentuating the tonal variety, he adds a third register of focus, a mottle of light in the image’s upper center. This is the sun-lit round straw hat of a man on the balconyStieglitz jubilantly attributes this man’s serendipitous glance downward as “the completion of the whole picture.”[7] This pre-shooting arrangement goes smoothly, except for one hitch: Stieglitz’s camera is in his cabin. However, he is lucky—when he returns with it, all elements, including the hat’s illumination, remain unchanged.[8] Stieglitz’s proto-cubist interest in “the most beautiful symmetry” has been celebrated alongside what President Theodore Roosevelt savvily portrayed as its celebration of a “nation of immigrants.”[9] The year 1907 marked the pinnacle of immigration in US history, with a record of 1.3 million people sailing across the seas to US ports.[10] Stieglitz often proclaimed that The Steerage was born from his “new vision of people, the common people … and the feeling of release that I was away from the mob called the rich.”[11] While this remark may seem somewhat cynical, the photograph’s impact indeed extends beyond its formalist achievement. Since the picture’s debut in Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist journal Camera Work in 1910, it has been seen as an iconic representation of US immigration, taught in numerous history classes and featured in documentaries over the century. Historian Kate Sampsell-Willmann notes, “most people, historians and lay alike, assume that The Steerage is a picture of immigration to America.”[12] However, as the term “assume” indicates, this perception is indeed oriented in the wrong direction. The steamer was en route to Europe. Its passengers were leaving the US, either visiting family or permanently moving away. Above all, many of the passengers were identified as “undesirable” based on their ethnicities, appearance, attire, and the “area of the boat where they lodged,” starkly contrasting with the upper-deck’s wealthy vacationers like Stieglitz. They were deported from the US port.[13] For these individuals, The Steerage symbolized the American Dream thwarted at its threshold, at the notorious Immigration and Customs at Ellis Island.[14] However, recognizing The Steerage as a voyage away from America is nearly impossible, given the pervasive portrayal of the US as a “nation of immigrants” across visual art, literature, popular music, journalism, and other cultural mediums. This navigational error in the social imagination is a product of what photography historian Roberto Tejada terms North America’s “shared image environment,” where Atlantic imagery frequently evokes discovery of and entry into the continent.[15] “The shared image environment” is constructed through “theoretical, practical, and political” devices of representations, notably photographs, political catchphrases, and textbooks, which in turn sculpt social perceptions and imaginings of the continent’s space and time.[16] The idea of the US as a welcoming destination for immigrants was already prevalent in public art projects at that time. One prime example was the New York State Government’s renovation of the memorial plaque of the Statue of Liberty in 1902. Positioned near Ellis Island as the “Mother of Exile,” this statue has long portrayed the country’s presumed openness to immigrants. The new plaque features arguably the most popular piece of American literature: Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus (1883). Having been integrated into the monumental statue and mass-distributed to tourists and immigrants through catalogues, The New Colossus has contributed to the global image of the US as a democratic, color-blind sanctuary for immigrants from poor and lowly backgrounds:… From her beacon-handGlows world-wide welcomeher mild eyes commandThe air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries sheWith silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’[17] ​Imagine immigrants enter the Atlantic port, gazing upon the Statue of Liberty rising on the horizon, and reading the poem in the immigration guidebook. The unison between print, public monuments, and literature underpins North America’s powerful image environment over the last century, where such multimedia depictions of the Atlantic Ocean have been molded into the prevailing social ideologies of immigration, even when misoriented in the wrong direction. Contrary to the poem’s humanitarian voice, the image environment glossed over the harrowing conditions of seafaring endured by third-class passengers in cramped berths.[18] Stieglitz saw the bleak disparities between passengers on the two decks, later recalling the moment as “two different worlds merg[ing] in the picture.”[19] Yet, as an affluent German-Jewish American traveling first-class to France, he had but a vague connection to the raucous European immigrants down in the lower deck. Stieglitz found himself more captivated by the ship’s rigid geometric composition, an element lauded by the great cubist Pablo Picasso. Upon seeing the photograph, he exclaimed, “cete photo, c’est tout à fait dans mon esprit!”[20] In reality, when the US’s Atlantic ports were bustling with activity in the era of The Steerage, the country had gradually implemented exclusive border policies predicated on class, gender, race, religion, ideology, physical attributes, and phenotypes, which had been first practiced against Asian immigrants in the Pacific ports since the 1880s. These policies barred the immigration of ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities and illnesses, anarchists, syndicalists, and communists.[21] Even had the photograph captured an arrival rather than a departure, those beholding the Statue of Liberty would have faced a rigorous, often capricious, process of inspection, quarantine, detention, incarceration, and deportation at Ellis Island’s Immigration and Customs.[22] The oceans, ports, border protocols, and photography together operated as “racializing apparatuses,” institutionalizing racialized ideologies and xenophobic practicses as I experienced and articulated in the Prologue. My concept of the border as a “racializing apparatus” emphasizes the performative nature of Tejada’s “shared image environment,” providing society with the means to discipline and control the flow of bodies at the border.[23] Ports were the stages upon which US society witnessed the construction of Whiteness through meticulous performative techniques and ritualistic scripts. This category, acknowledged as racially Caucasian, culturally western, religiously Protestant, rooted in heteropatriarchal domesticity, and ideologically capitalist, comprised a group deemed suitable for US citizenship. However, not all Europeans were effortlessly integrated into this privileged category. Whiteness is primarily a social script, and immigrants were met with this script upon their arrival at the gate of the US. The Atlantic Ocean, acting as a racializing apparatus, steered European immigrants towards the directions and directives of White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant culture. This assimilation process involved subtle yet significant acts. For example, immigrants checked “no” on immigration surveys to vouch for their non-unionized, non-criminal, and law-abiding status, showcasing their allegiance to liberal ideologies. They also dealt with the often-unpredictable decisions of immigration and customs officers by mastering gestures, facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues to compensate for limited English proficiency.[24] That year in 1907, approximately 1.3 million immigrants managed to perform the entry rituals. Not long after, they faced the Great Depression, which ended the Progressive Era. In a sense, the Depression marked the beginning of the sea’s disappearance from the social imagination of the US. In the 1930s, Manhattan, as with other major US cities, had functioning harbors at the urban center, and The New York Times prominently displayed the “Shipping/Mails” section on their front pages, documenting the schedules of passenger, mail, and cargo ships. However, between https://i-model-h0use.com the 1940s and ’60s, Manhattan harbors were gradually relocated to New Jersey, and the NYT’s shipping section sank entirely from sight in 1985.[25] Walker Evans’s (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 ~ 1975) photograph poignantly captures the remnant of the era’s blurred social landscape of land and sea, with laid-off financial district workers and dock workers converging on the streets of the Bowery, New York [Figure 1.2]. Their postures, reclining or seated on newspapers or cardboard, conjure images of survivors on rafts, visually demonstrating why the media frequently allude to economic crises to “shipwrecks.” Perhaps, immigration in North America after the 1930s no longer emitted the allure of the previous decades, and people in the Evans photograph could have rightly identified the passengers depicted in The Steerage as leaving the US, the American Dream collapsed. Photographs remained the same, only the image environment changed.Figure 1.2. Walker Evans, South Street, New York, gelatin silver print, 14.7 x 18 cm, 1932. In the following pages, I want to think about how we can reconceptualize maritime images as instrumental in the construction of American art and society’s perception of globality, foregrounding my thesis of photography’s realist and documentary function, or what I call “photographic crafts.” This term refers to both craftsmanship, which is characterized by photography’s astounding optical realism and grainy texture, and statecraft, involving maritime empires’ collection and identification of individuals and commodities through extensive photographic documentation. This thesis situates photography’s role in the continued establishment of contrasting visions of the global oceans that I trace back to museum objects, lens devices, and seascape paintings in the subsequent sections. These objects and images, mostly derived from the historical Atlantic world, found theoretical backdrops to the subsequent chapters’ shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This thesis also positions documentary photography within the complex problem of representing labor and movement in the history of capitalism, a particularly critical task when the medium’s social referentiality has been widely disputed since late nineties postmodernism. For this task, I will study Sekula’s maritime images to argue that modernist photography’s mechanical and optical qualities are not detached from social reality. Also, by analyzing photographs’ compositions and parallel connections, it is possible to retrace the Pacific Ocean and its “doubly forgotten” modalities of movement, even from such Atlantic seascapes as The Steerage, whose racializing apparatuses are indeed originated from the late-nineteenth-century Pacific ports. Lenses, Ships, Prints, and Tools: Constructing Oceans Before PhotographyBy the late nineteenth century, with fifteen million immigrants entering the country between 1890 and 1910, there was a growing effort to reinforce immigration control. Photography’s mechanical and optical realism made it the most ideal instrument for the emerging maritime empire and police state to oversee the surging populations and commodities. This process commenced at ports, where passengers were subject to extensive documentation, inspections, body searches, detentions, and deportations. In this context, photography’s role extended beyond mere documentation within immigration bureaus and police departments. Photographic realism enabled the police states of the northern Atlantic to discern citizens from foreigners, classify immigrants as desirable or undesirable, suppress unruly maritime labor, and detect spies entering ports.[26] It is important to remember that photographic realism is a central feature not only in commercial images but also in modernist photography. Photographs like The Steerage take on a dual role here: they are pivotal in merging the oceans into the perception of modern life by capturing vivid details, while simultaneously eroding their geographic distinctions on the grainy photographic surface. As my analysis of Evans’s photograph indicates, before the Depression, the oceans could be portrayed at least as an extension of land apparatuses, just as The Steerage’s transoceanic steamer is part of the port’s task of identifying individuals based on their varying degrees of desirability. However, seascapes, relocated from urban centers in the subsequent decades, have grown increasingly generic and remote in American art. This disappearance was already implicated in Stieglitz’s portrayal of the Atlantic Ocean from which the American audience saw a symbol of immigration to the US and the American dream. In North America’s shared image environment, if the Atlantic has been rendered blurred and misdirected, the Pacific remains completely absent and doubly forgotten. This invisibility may be due in part to socio-political events, notably the enactment of the “Chinese Exclusion Act” of 1882 and the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907, which resulted in Japan “voluntarily” restricting its workers from emigrating to the US mainland.[27] Yet, I propose that the maritime world’s fading presence is more an epistemological shift than a concrete historical occurrence. If historical events alone were the sole drivers of the Pacific Ocean’s eclipse in history, the burgeoning Asian economy, the subsequent heightened market value of its art, and the Pacific Ocean’s growing strategic importance to US interests in recent history would likely have restored the Pacific’s prominence in the contemporary imagination. However, paradoxically, as Asian artistic narratives appear increasingly enmeshed in contemporary art discourse, the Pacific seems even more relegated to merely a backdrop in the vision of art history.[28] This project conceptually distinguishes the Pacific from Asia, the Pacific Islands, or the American West Coast. While these regions are crucial in understanding the Pacific as a construct, as I outlined in the Introduction, my research perceives the Pacific through vital but overlooked modalities of movement in modern and contemporary periods. These maritime modalities operate independently but closely align with the rhythms of the terrestrial world. Conversely, the Atlantic, despite its abstracted representation in images such as The Steerage, remains relatively prominent. The historical modalities invented in the trans-Atlantic world—such as open-sea sailing, mass transportation, forced displacement, and plantations that created the Middle Passage—have been central to the narratives of capitalism and globalization. In what follows, tracing the historical sources of photography’s instrumentality, I investigate lens devices and labor objects appearing in Sekula’s Fish Story, laying the groundwork for later chapters’ exploration of the portrayals of the Pacific in late-twentieth-century documentary and realist art projects. Fish Story is Sekula’s comprehensive transoceanic documentary photographic projects conducted between 1989 and 1995, constituting one-hundred and five color photographs and twenty-six caption and text panels arranged in nine chapters, which accompany two lengthy essays, with two projection only included in its exhibition form.[29] Fish Story’s ocean images convey Sekula’s distinct maritime perspective.[30] He interprets the diminishing visibility of oceans not just as a historical incident but as a “photographic phenomenon,” which is substantially influenced by modern media critics Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, viewing that the excessive quantity of photographic images overwhelm the perceived reality, yet photography can also reveal its hidden dimensions in society’s unconsciousness that the medium constructs and conceals.[31] In Sekula’s view, modernist photographs are not divorced from social reality. They have shaped the technical foundations and perceptual lenses for not only (post)modernist aesthetics but also state apparatuses and systems of global capitalism. Thus, I regard modernist photography as a foundational medium for analyzing documentary genres in my dissertation. To grasp photography’s documentary functions, we must consider its connection to historical media, notably prints, lens devices, museum objects, and labor tools, which have constructed modern perceptions of the maritime world and assisted capitalist operations across the world. This intermedia relationship is a staple topic in Fish Story, evidenced by tools and lens apparatus presented as the central subjects of Sekula’s photographs. Fish Story opens with the images of a pair of binoculars (or what is called a tower scope) from the sea observatory at Staten Island, New York. This photograph encapsulates the optical device’s vital role in the invention and development of panoramic perspective and techniques of realism in the history of European painting [Figures 1.3].Figures 1.3. Sekula, Boy looking at his mother. Staten Island Ferry. New York harbor. February 1990, Fish Story, 1995.​Rather than imitating painting, this photograph acts as a “simulator” for seascape paintings. The observatory’s window serves as a pictorial plane, framing a cargo ship sailing in the middle distance, reminiscent of the placement of vessels between the distant cityscape on the horizon and the viewer on shore in typical Dutch maritime paintings. This maritime view attests to how the modern European pictorial system is embedded in contemporary maritime framing, where human interaction with the sea is intermediated by man-made instruments, while the horizon is occupied by urban silhouettes. Central to this visual framework is the binocular, a key instrument that has recast maritime spaces as subjects for scientific measurement, military surveillance, and industrial espionage.[32]The instrumental nature of lens devices is prominently manifested through the category of tools, and Sekula’s sequential photographs capture this instrumentality [Figures 1.4-1.5]. Figures 1.4-1.5. Sekula, Survey new container storage area. Veracruz, March 1994, Fish Story, 1995. ​In the sequence of photographs Sekula took in Veracruz, Mexico, an engineer is maneuvering an altimeter on a tripod to survey even areas for the placement of storage containers.[33] These photographs forge a direct link between documentary vision, physical labor, and the port city’s colonial past. The littoral region’s soil, constantly exposed to the corrosive power of the sea, is unsuitable for enduring structures. When Hernán Cortés landed there in the early-sixteenth century, the Spaniards struggled building their settlement, port, and prison due to the lack of stable construction materials. Consequently, Cortés turned to sea resources, primarily corals, to strengthen his port fortress, San Juan de Ulúa, which became notorious for its torture and execution chambers and the exploitation of the Aztec’s gold.[34] Given these geographic constraints, lens devices have become vital for engineering land. The two sequential images underscore the inextricable link between photography and engineering labor, merging vision with labor, and the act of documenting with the act of measuring land as a critical aspect of colonial projects. This depiction goes beyond Buchloh’s framing of photography in his seminal essay “Allan Sekula: Photography between Discourse and Document” (1995) as a “dialectical” medium—one that is both an ocular-centric artistic medium and a discursive semiotic device—devoid of direct social referentiality, particularly regarding (auto)biographical references of labor and domestic life.[35]Also, by omitting the body of the engineer in the second image, Sekula casts the lens device itself as the documentary agent, conferring upon it an uncanny autonomy.Figure 1.6. Sekula, Ship models in vitrine with linear scale, Fish Story, 1995​Another historical precedent of photography is model ships, dating from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, exhibited in the Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum testifies to the ways in which European maritime empires monumentalized their dominion over the oceans as “Free Seas”—a concept crystallized in the seventeenth century by Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius.[36] Ship models served as early modern Europe’s techniques to conceive of the ocean as a vast, homogenized, and non-possessable expanse immune to territorial laws, a technique that placed the Rest as Europe’s colonial possessions and monopoly markets existing beyond these “Free seas.”[37] In the image above, Sekula’s camera zeroes in on the ruler at the right corner [Figure 1.6]. This measuring device offers a scale for comparing the size of ships, and its https://i-model-h0use.com red-and-white pattern mimics a jetty at the dock and functions as a “do not touch” sign in the museum. Sekula’s deliberate camera angle encapsulates the historical evolution of ships’ cargo capacities within a single frame, starting with the sixteenth-century galleon, transitioning to the eighteenth-century sailing ship and the nineteenth-century RMS steamer, and culminating in the twentieth-century “econship.”[38] A groundbreaking innovation from the 1980s global shipping industry, the econship is engineered to maximize its shipability by eliminating on-deck cranes and instead relying entirely on the grids of gigantic, automated dock-side cranes.[39] In essence, the museum chronicles the material trajectory of globalization and its economies of scale, evident in both the evolution of ship designs and the visually prominent ruler. Figure 1.7. Model simulating the movement of the sea. Maritiem Museum Prins Hendrik, Rotterdam. November 1993, Fish Story, 1995. This historical arc reveals cargo ships as having remained slow and become more vulnerable to sinking, an outcome of the global shipping industry’s growing demands for capacity. Exemplifying the economy of scale, the industry favors volume over velocity, prioritizing shipability above floatability. This design focus on building ever-larger vessels to boost shipping capacity has heightened their risk of sinking. Furthermore, because ship designs have leaned on hydraulic principles, harnessing ocean currents or seasonal winds to optimize capacity while conserving fuel, sailing speed has remained relatively stagnant over the last three hundred years. The museum’s nineteenth-century wave simulation model illustrates this paradox: the miniature boat remains stable amidst turbulent waves, in contrast to the sailing ship, the wreckage of which is indicated by the broken mast to the left [Figure 1.7]. These are the liquescent history of capitalism: as ships grow in size, their floatability is proportionally compromised.Figure 1.8. “Fishing, fabrication of nets,” from Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, plates, Vol. 7, 1771. Concluding my inventory of photography’s forerunners is an image from Fish Story’s final page: an illustrated print from the Encyclopédie (1772), providing a visual instruction for crafting a fishing net. This publication, disseminating Enlightenment ideas globally through advanced print technologies, maritime networks, and rigorous visual naturalism, foresees the astounding realism of photography [Figure 1.8].[40] The Encyclopédie is vested in introducing new maritime technologies essential to the rise of capitalism, representing a variety of objects and technologies through the hyperrealistic details of its printed illustrations. These illustrations have promulgated an ethos that deems humans, resources, goods, tools, and technologies as shipable, facilitating Europe’s systematic conversion of human labor into living cargo for mass transportation to far-flung plantations and factories in the Caribbean and the New World. There, these diverse forms of capital would synergistically develop into what can be called modern capitalist industries. The illustrated fishing net visually asserts the need for a rationalized fishery industry, heavily reliant on the institution of slavery.[41] Indeed, the print serves as the “instrumental image,” foreshadowing photography’s both ethical and epistemological mission to document the modern world objectively, scientifically, and systematically in its totality. These early optical devices, prints, museum artifacts, and labor tools are historical antecedents to photography’s political and aesthetic functions, instrumental in producing fluctuating visions of the ocean. This mission would not have been completed without the rise of photography, whose astounding realism has provided modern police states with vital techniques for modernization and globalization, while modernist aesthetics has concealed the medium’s seamless integration into the apparatuses of power. The Instrumental Image and Documentary LaborBefore I return to The Steerage, I will briefly visit the discourse on photography in the 1990s. At that time, documentary photography’s aesthetic and political status met with significant challenges by postmodern art criticism. In this tradition, photographic representations primarily operate in the speculative domains of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist discourse, while photographs’ referentiality is little considered. Postmodern art critics have contributed to establishing photography as a predominant artistic medium, or more accurately, a predominant mode of representation that characterizes postmodern art criticism’s theoretical understanding of pictures. This mode of representation is distinctly non-referential, as broadly conceptualized by postmodern art critics including but not limited to Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Douglas Crimp, who envision images as shifting signifiers freed from the naturalized linkage between symbols and referents as defined in the traditional semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.[42] Traditionally, to mean something, it was understood that a painting shows symbols rather than the referent—the “something” to which an image is thought to point—thereby making the relationship between symbols and what they symbolize referential.[43] To break from this referential linkage, postmodern art critics generally suggest, is the aesthetic mission of the avant-garde, and, surprisingly, the most ardent protagonist of this mission is the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg.[44] In the (post)modernist paradigm, photography is not just a genre of art but it provides a model of representation that is aesthetically independent from referential art such as painting. The traditional concept of referentiality—that symbols maintain substantial, if not one-to-one, correspondences with their referents in the real world—served as a convenient political basis for realist art to claim representations’ direct or at least superior connection to reality and social life. If we consider this background, postmodern art criticism prompts a fundamental reevaluation of the aesthetic underpinnings of documentary photography, significantly complicating, if not totally disputing, photography’s social referentiality. This does not imply that postmodern art criticism dismisses documentary art’s potential to represent the social in a wholesale mannerrather, it demands an in-depth theoretical engagement with the concept of representation, challenging the lazy assumption of referentiality by social realism. However, in often cases, it ends up promoting second-hand, indirect methods of approach to reality. In “Allan Sekula: Photography Between Discourse and Document,” Buchloh analyzes photographic art’s continuing possibility of representing labor and politics in the postmodern age from a New Left standpoint—influenced by Frederick Jameson’s representation theory in the 1980s—acknowledging the unattainability of transparent representation while remaining committed to the work of art’s avant-garde intervention in social life.[45] For the postmodern art critic, this potential stems from the photographer’s juxtaposition of photographs and other signs to construct photo montages. Buchloh perceives photography as a discursive medium, less concerned with documenting reality in figurative forms and realist approaches than with restructuring the audience’s preconceived ideas of the world through the epistemological shock of photo montages and editing techniques. This approach situates photography in the domain of discourse and theory—a speculative medium enabling the audience to excavate concealed reality from unfamiliar images. In a sense, Buchloh strives to rescue photography from postmodern art criticism’s general rejection of traditional realism, defending this medium’s avant-garde potential against what he sees as the “bureaucratic and managerial” logic of the appropriation photography practiced by “Pictures Generation” artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Robert Longo, and Sherrie Levine and the “photographic aggrandizement” of Jeff Wall and the Düsseldorf School of Photography including Bernd and Hilda Becher, Thomas Struth, and Andreas Gursky.[46] However, to secure photography’s avant-garde capacity in the increasingly commodified spaces of postmodern art, Buchloh compromises the medium’s embodied dimensions, where photographs, as objects circulating among and intimately experienced by sitters and photographers, possess distinct social life, rather than existing solely as mere documentary evidence or dematerialized signifiers. Buchloh dismisses corporeal signs and biographical traces in photographic art, as he deems that this sensory reduction guarantees photography’s epistemological distance from both commodity fetish and the cult of the genius artist, which he calls the “myth of the parthenogenesis of the patriarchal artist.”[47] Containing unnecessary intimacy, emotional excess or, worse, the bourgeoisie subject’s hypocritical identification with minorities, the embodied and experiential dimensions of documentary photography are to be “totally banished from [postmodern art criticism’s] dominant discursive formations.”[48] Nevertheless, what one encounters in such signs is not necessarily the genius myth. Rather, one is confronted with the social in embodied forms, which are far from innocent or merely sentimental, and are potentially more perilous than the myth itself. After all, the biographical is pivotal in the capitalist state’s projects of turning individuals into compliant consumers, scientifically categorizing capitalist possessions, and objectively documenting the entirety of their territories. For these dehumanizing processes to be accepted by individuals, these must be formalized into objective, indeed harsh, yet somehow acceptable experiences. These experiences are mediated and produced not only by photography’s mechanical and optical properties but also by the highly performative exchange of affects between photographs and the bodies that hold them. Examples include mugshots of criminals and suspects used for police investigators’ efforts of identification, hyper-realistic advertisements that create intimacy in modern family life, and the arresting tactile quality of modernist photography.[49] Such multisensorial qualities are suppressed in (post)modernism’s ocular-centric aesthetics, with photography’s complex instrumentality reduced to bureaucratic logic or the seriality and grid of postmodern art. Perhaps this reduction is more than a result of commodity fetish or the geinus cultit may unwittingly reflect, to use Jürgen Habermas’s expression, “modernity’s unfinished project,” or its belief in meaning’s transparent transmission in the spaces of discourse through formal communication media.[50] As much as this belief is most visible today through global capitalism’s integrationist ambition to register all things, we cannot disentangle postmodern art’s expansive grids and serial progression of images from the aesthetic project of modernity. In this regard, I interpret postmodernism’s prefix “post” as meaning “continuing” the unfinished modernism rather than “after” it, hence “(post)modernism.” Against Buchloh’s “Photography between Discourse and Documentary,” I reinstate photography’s embodied dimensions in this dissertation’s examination of the formation of maritime perceptions in twentieth-century art. My approach is informed by none other than Sekula’s essay “Photography between Labor and Capital” (1983), included in Buchloh’s co-edited book on photography. Here, Sekula explores “pictures from a company public relations archive” in the Canadian mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, taken by local studio photographer Leslie Shedden (Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1913 ~ 1987). While primarily serving the mining industry’s management purpose, Shedden’s photographs also capture the intimate social life of his clients and harsh labor conditions of the North American hinterland, spurring labor protests and the formation of citizen organizations [Figure 1.9].[51]Figure 1.9. From the negative archives of Shedden Studio. All photographs taken by Leslie Shedden, from Mining Photography and Other Pictures 1948-1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton. “Photography between Labor and Capital,” a book-length text spanning over 90 pages and relatively lesser-known among Sekula’s critical essays, conveys his developing insights into the medium after graduating from UCSD. By the time he worked on this piece, Sekula had been introduced to New York-based art critic circles through Buchloh and became conversant with founding theoretical texts on language, representation, media, and power by scholars such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida.[52] As a result, his photography theory began to reflect a deconstructionist view on representation and photographic meaning, while still upholding photography’s socially embedded status that reproduces (counter)power—intimacy, coalition, and a means of identification and violence for workers and minoritized individuals. Herein lies an apparent conflict: https://i-model-h0use.com highlighting the lens medium’s social referentiality seems to contradict the critique of society’s ingrained belief that photographs convey truths. To maintain this contradiction in a productive manner, Sekula embraces Foucault’s concept of discourse and/as power, which posits that some truths, which are basically the effects of discourse, can serve radical minoritarian politics as they “provide an experience [that] veers between nostalgia, horror, and an overriding sense of the exoticism of the past, its irretrievable otherness for the viewer in the present.” By not simply rejecting photography’s ideological function of truths as a false construct, Sekula sets himself apart from his contemporaries who first sever photographs from referentiality and then “transform [photographs] into esthetic objects.”[53] While Sekula’s critique of “auteurism” primarily aims at modernist aesthetics, it appears equally relevant to postmodern art criticism’s disinterest in what Sekula illustrates as “actual photographic practices” within “social institutions—corporation, school, family—that are speaking by means of the commercial photographer’s craft.”[54] As I defined in the earlier thesis, Sekula’s identification of “craft” in photography is twofold—it is characterized by the medium’s formal methods (as in craftsmanship) and modern police state’s device of identification and documentation (as in statecraft). Photography was invented as a practical instrument, as recognized by eminent social engineers including French mathematician and politician François Arago (1786 ~ 1853), American physician and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809 ~ 1894), English eugenic scientist Francis Galton (1822 ~ 1911), and American inventor of the modern labor management system Frederick W. Taylor (1856 ~ 1915). The medium’s utilitarian history presumably ends with the emergence of modernist photography in the narratives of photography historians such as Beaumont Newhall.[55]However, modernist photographers matched, if not excelled, the commercial photographer’s craftsmanship to fully exploit the medium’s astounding realism. The success of modernist photographs like The Steerage or Edward Steichen’s aerial photographs (ca. 1915 ~ 1918) is attributed to the modernist photographer’s mastery of photographic crafts shared with others working in family album studios, advertising, military campaigns, governmental archives, and scientific research.[56] Likewise, the success of The Steerage hinged on meeting high-quality craftsmanship, and failing to meet the standards would have diminished The Steerage’s visual appeal to the public. Considering this, modernist photography does not signify the medium’s isolation in the realm of art, but rather the apex of photography’s integration into the social. Reflecting on photography as both aesthetic and social “craft,” I am tempted to position photographers within a class of “engineers,” field managers, or highly skilled “detail workers,” rather than as artists within intellectual classes.[57] However, I warn against identifying the artist with the “proletariat,” against the art world reproduction of the reductive division of intellectual and manual labor. For me, the photographer-engineer metaphor renders documentary photography as mediating the growing divide between intellectual and manual labor, exposing highly complex class dynamics among remote company owners, executive officers, clerical workers, field supervisors, and low-skilled workers.[58] Applying this perspective to the opening photographic image, The Steerage, I will undertake an in-depth visual and social analysis in the following section. Reading the Atlantic Photograph Against the GrainBy now, readers should have recognized one of the key subjects of “On Currents” as photographic crafts, referring in this chapter to modernist photography’s instrumental role in statecraft—portraying the US as a country of immigrants—and contemporary documentary photography’s formal techniques of portraying the patterns and shapes of the Pacific Ocean in the subsequent chapters. Photographic crafts have produced the oscillating perception of the ocean’s reality, time, and space in global visual cultures. As in The Steerage, the photographer’s mastery of mechanical and optical properties—the aperture, shutter speed, and chemical reactions during the exposure—captures the subjects’ motions, tremors, indeed conditions of labor on the photograph’s blurred surface. As such, even generic ocean photographs reflect the precise reality of the oceans’ eclipse. As historian of photography John Tagg famously demonstrates, before art institutions recognized photography as an art form, the medium’s first collectors were the police, along with the military, the court, and commercial sectors.[59]They compiled profiles of criminals, paupers, vagabondage, syndicalists, sailors, and ordinary citizens. This early archival impulse ran parallel with the rise of modern police states, and photography developed in two intertwined directions, a phenomenon illuminated in “The Body and the Archive” (1986), Sekula’s writing on the photography of the late-nineteenth century: To the extent that bourgeois order depends upon the systematic defense of social relations based on private property, to the extent that the legal basis of the self lies in the model of property rights, in what has been termed “possessive individualism,” every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.[60] The division was social rather than formal. The mugshot format, with its emphasis on precise anthropometric qualities and high-resolution clarity, bears a striking resemblance to modernist photography’s dedication to intricate detail, epitomizing what Sekula terms “applied realism” through which “[photography’s] information [is] not so much exchanged as directedmeaning, severely constrained, [becomes] a means to an immediate material end.”[61] If I expand this reading, modernist photography’s art historical counterparts would not be the cubist paintings in museums, but rather the reproduced images in commercial catalogues and the mugshots stored in the cabinets of police investigation, demographic census, and national security bureaus. In other words, every photograph in museums has its “lurking, objectifying inverse” in a “shadow archive” in modern police states.[62]Photography’s applied realism makes the medium a crucial tool for representative democratic states to produce governable citizen subjects, as the expansion of citizen rights necessitates extensive documentation in the state’s legal and extralegal acts. However, this role is deeply ambivalent, for photographic images can both establish and undermine democratic rights and the founding concepts of private property and privacy. This contradiction arises from the mechanically reproducible and swiftly referrable photographic images, which oscillate between clearly identifiable images of individuals and constellations of miniscule grains on the light-sensitive chemical surface. These images’ putative scientific objectivity is illusory, but it does produce social truths and power. Just like photographic realism, the nature of power is contradictory, where every rule constitutes its own transgression, beyond the reach of constitutions and democratic systems. Carl Schmidt and Giorgio Agamben describe this nature of power as “the state of exception,” a state where the law is suspended, and sovereign violence is naturalized.[63] (The state of exception is a common backdrop for most photographic projects in the subsequent chapters, especially Chapter Four.) We can visually trace the state of exception from the paintings of romantic seascapes and maritime warfare in modern art history, which represent the oceans as external to modernity while inscribing the state’s desire for exceptional power in the volatile, amorphous shapes of ocean currents. Photographs often fail to serve these desires. More precisely, no photographic exactitude could resolve the anxiety of modern police states, thwarting their ambition to seamlessly identify and exert control over water-crossing individuals and commodities by archiving their precise photographic resemblances. In this sense, photography can also reveal the state and global capitalism’s most vulnerable points in times of expansion and integration. Kracauer illuminates the “doomed fate” of the modern state’s use of photography by remarking that the age of “the flood of photos” is also a “period [that knows] so little about itself.”[64]One can hardly mistake this doomed fate of ambition in The Steerage. Initially, Stieglitz’s ambition to create a profoundly cubist picture is evident in his lucid capture of the ship’s striated, compartmentalized structure. However, upon closer examination, his cubist ambition does not correspond to the state’s ambition, which falters in the face of the medium’s oscillation between figuration and abstraction, where the gelatin surface dissolves into insubstantial patterns of tiny grains [Figure 1.1.1]. Figure 1.1.1. Stieglitz, The Steerage (detail), 1907.​This oscillation, basically a formal problem, hinders the viewer’s ability to extend their gaze beyond the singular frame and place it next to other images and texts about the period’s material conditions and social perceptions on sailing, immigration, maritime labor, and the American Dream. The more the gaze fixates on the single image, the less the viewer perceives the deeply segregated and racialized reality of US immigration—a reality that becomes more visible when The Steerage is viewed in conjunction with other photographs of American oceans. In this, modernist aesthetics attempt to reduce the vibrant scenes of labor and the diverse ethnic features of the passengers on the deck to objects of pure visual pleasure. While postmodern art criticism contests this visual pleasure, it often ends up oversimplifying this illusionistic vision as merely stemming from realism’s ideological fallacy—the prevailing belief in the lens device’s scientific objectivity—thereby reinforcing modernism’s aesthetic distance from social referents. Seminal works including Art Since 1900 (2004) or The Return of the Real (1996), both of which centrally discuss the meanings of realism and the real in modern and contemporary art, seldom analyze how the bureaucratic and managerial ambitions of modern states operate on representations, even though these ambitions are directly founded on the same erroneous belief in photography’s transparency that the authors criticize.[65] While the authors, through their updated theories of representation, could proclaim figuration and social referentiality as crude and outmoded aesthetic systems, complex political and aesthetic puzzles in defining the meaning of the real and enacting its social effect are also lost within the hermeneutic inner circuit of postmodernist theory. To unravel these puzzles from modern and contemporary American photographs, my research examines the intertwined politics and aesthetics of The Steerage. Seen through this lens, the ambiguous ethnic status of the fluctuating silhouettes sheds light on the Atlantic border’s process of producing the White body at the time of increasingly regulated borders in the so-called “nation of immigrants.”[66] The ship’s rigid cubist structure transforms into a racializing apparatus, governed by the politics of segregation already at work, with The Steerage’s blurry figures caught in the bureaucratic web of identification and disciplines that morphed desirable European bodies into White American citizens. Nevertheless, this oscillation can also disrupt the very apparatus of representationin close-up views, the visual markers of ethnic, national, class, and gender backgrounds are blurry and porous. As in Evans’s Bowery image, the boundaries between citizens and immigrants, financial bourgeoisie and wage workers, or urbanites and seamen dissolve and crumble, defying the emerging maritime empire’s desperate attempts to maintain their ethnic and class distinctions [Figure 1.2]. Ultimately, while these figures may represent generic morphologies for demographic categories and class types in the US, it only becomes difficult to definitely match the grainy, simmering silhouettes with the specific attributes and factual presence of each individual on the ship during that particular day of sailing. Recognizing this oscillation’s political and aesthetic implications can also impact the historical interpretation of The Steerage as a “photo of immigration to America.”[67] Although historians know that the photograph depicts passengers’ departure from the US, the photograph itself has become part of what Tejada calls a “shared image environment” of North America. This idea points to photography’s discursive power in everyday life that can easily overturn the meaning of https://i-model-h0use.com historical events portrayed in photographs, even reversing the steamer’s initially outbound direction in the social imagination.[68] For a century since its release in Camera Work, US society has presented time and time again The Steerage within educational curricula, media, publications, online content, and daily conversation as emblematic of US immigration.[69] Presented to the photograph in art history courses, I expect many American students would associate the passengers with the future citizens of the US, perhaps even seeing in those figures the faces of their forebears from Europe.[70] Objective language alone is insufficient to dismantle this myth, as it has become entrenched in the continent’s image ecosystem. The viewer’s innocent take on The Steerage testifies to photography’s power of shaping North America’s vision of globalization, migration, and the American dream, where nobody is forcefully expelled or spontaneously leaves the continent. Importantly, this power, capable of even inverting the Atlantic’s direction of sailing, functions within the “trans-” framework that I described as prevalent in American art historical narratives in the Introduction. The term “trans-” often characterizes the privileged cosmopolitan subject’s perception that people and commodities move, as they do, through the air swiftly, smoothly, and safely. This idea is widespread across both the Pacific and Atlantic worlds, with the Pacific often metaphorically described as a “rim,” which is conceptually indistinguishable from “trans-.”[71] The dominant historical precursor to this “trans-” framework traces back to the development of capitalism in the Atlantic world, whose (often speculated) modalities and patterns of exchange and travel have been universalized in American art historical scholarship. In the trans-Atlantic framework, the intricate and discontinuous spaces of the ocean turn into a universal, homogenous, and continuous space, reminiscent of the panoramic seascapes in seventeenth-century Dutch painting or American readers’ frequent neglect of the geographic specificities of oceanic backgrounds in literary works such as Moby Dick.[72] Mainly emerging from these aesthetic phenomena, the trans-Atlantic world is depicted as uniform and homogeneous and embodies modalities that highlight the privileged subject’s ability to effortlessly traverse across vast oceanic expanses. This maritime world assumes speculative forms, neglecting the formative role of the ocean’s rugged geography, circuitous passages, and the challenges inherent in crossing distances. One might see the Pacific’s eclipse as merely a lack of the ocean’s representation in modern and contemporary art and media. However, the Pacific’s omission occurs in the very act of looking through the lens of the “trans-” framework. It is obscured by the epistemological speculation of the “trans-” framework, impairing American art’s capacity to perceive, represent, and engage with the Pacific world to which its society belongs. In this regard, I argue that every canonical image of oceans in American art, if seen through the lens of the “trans-” framework, reflects a universalized sea stripped of its historical and geographic specificities and complex techniques of migration and transit that continue to define globalization. To escape the “trans-Atlantic” world, we should stay a bit longer in the ocean, until we discover its palpable patterns and shapes. To this goal, Chapter Two introduces readers to the slow, disrupted, and delayed modalities of the Atlantic and other oceans. It also investigates the ocean’s homogenization in the existing literature on Sekula documentary projects, where his seascapes are reduced to a dialectic between two visual motifs, the panorama and the detail, respectively symbolizing the macroscopic images of global logistics and the close-up pictures of individual workers and tools. This approach overlooks Sekula’s recurrent visual motif of small planar circles moving on the ocean’s surface. These “vortices,” paced by atomized maritime workers, narrow and fall into each other with the speed of ocean currents, slowly integrating distant maritime spaces. It is through the vortex motif that Sekula visualizes contemporary globalization as a slow, disrupted, delayed, yet consistent process unfolding across the oceans. His maritime vision has become more urgent in understanding globalization in its current phase called the “great fracture” since the late twenty-teens, when the Trump administration, represented by his famous isolationist remark, “Future does not belong to globalists,” reinforced border control policies and incited xenophobic sentiments across the globe.[73] From Chapter Two’s interconnected seas, the Pacific emerges in our sight.​​ BibliographyAhmed, Sarah. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Berger, Maurice, et al. Masterworks of the Jewish Museum. New York: The Jewish Museum, 2004. 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