Curator’s Notes The Lottery of the Sea, shot in the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Japan and other maritime countries, took five years to make. Sekula unfolds a series of variations around two of his major obsessions, globalization and the sea. While exploring the mystics of the sea as a “primordial source of sublimity,” a matrix of narratives – Greek myths, American movies, and stories of longshoremen, lost sailors, and displaced populations – he reflects on the globalizing effects of Adam Smith’s aphorism, which compares the life of the seafarer to gambling. “Allan Sekula is one of the most thoughtful historians, critics and practitioners of photography (and, more recently, video) working today. From his investigation of maritime space to his extensive travels to many of the world's seaports, Sekula's trajectory transforms and connects domains that aren't usually compared.” Bomb Magazine

Production Notes:

The Lottery of the Sea takes its title from Adam Smith, who in his famous Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776), compared the life of the seafarer to gambling. Thus notions of risk were introduced by Smith through an allegory of the sea's dangers especially for those who did the hard work, and also for those who invested in ships and goods.

The film asks: is there a relationship between the most frightening and terrifying concept in economics, that of risk, and the category of the sublime in aesthetics?

It is an offbeat diary extending from the presumably "innocent" summer of 2001 through to the current "war on terror" by way of a meandering, essayistic voyage from seaport to seaport, waterfront to waterfront, and coast to coast.

What does it mean to be a maritime nation? To rule the waves? Or to harvest the sea?

An American submarine collides with a Japanese fisheries training ship. What does this suggest about the division of labor in the Pacific?

Panama decides whether to expand the width of its canal, over which it now exercises a certain qualified measure of sovereignty. How is it that a scuba diver would be most prepared to question this great flushing of the jungle watershed?

Galicia is presented with an unwanted gift of oil, with important questions following about the monomania of governments able only to conceptualize danger in one dimension.

Barcelona turns anew to its seafront, producing a pseudo-public sphere and new real estate value to the north and even greater maritime logistical efficiency to the south.

In between, we visit blizzards and demonstrations in New York, drifting prehistoric mastodons in Los Angeles, militant drummers and bemused African construction workers in Lisbon, millionaires or millionaire-impersonators in Amsterdam, and the stray dogs of Athens, all by way of thinking through seeing the sea, the market, and democracy.

—Allan Sekula

Allan Sekula is a photographer, filmmaker, writer and critic. Having grown in San Pedro (CA), he has taught at the California Institute of Arts since 1985. He has been described as a pioneer in reworking what is usually called "social realism." His photographs most often focus on people engaged in political or economic struggles, or iconic structures as part of his exploration of global economic systems. He started the “maritime work” projects that are now his trademark in the mid-1980s.

Sekula is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Getty Research Institute, the Deutsche Akademischer Austausdienst and the Atelier Calder. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver, the University Art Museum at Berkeley, Tramway in Glasgow, Le Channel and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Calais, Camerawork in London, Munich Kunstverein in Munich, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, ICA in Boston, and P.S. 1 in New York. His massive Fish Story project has been shown, in progress or in completion, at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Moderne Museet in Stockholm, Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002). In 2003, the Generali Foundation in Vienna organized a retrospective of his work, and his early “slide projection” (1972) is included in the massive exhibition Los Angeles 1955-1985 taking place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Sekula’s published books are Photography Against the Grain (1984), Fish Story (1995), Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes (1996), Dismal Science (1999), TITANIC's Wake (2003) and Performance under Working Conditions (2003).

In 2001, Sekula completed his first film Tsukiji (2001), which was then followed by Gala (2005). He describes both works as "city symphonies of a sort.” He has been working on The Lottery of the Sea since May 2001.