While photographer and critic Allan Sekula could in his influential 1995 monograph Fish Story diagnose a cultural ‘forgetting’ of the sea, a perhaps too-enthusiastic contemporary fetish for the maritime as spectacle has given rise to a new sea of images. This talk historicises the recent deluge of maritime imagery, drawing out its connections with earlier representational regimes. Exploring these interconnections will shed light on the contemporaneity of the sea image’s proliferation, an aesthetic excess which renders visible the contradictions at the heart of very different eras of globalisation.
Jonathan Stafford is Research Fellow at the Leibiz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, working on the ERC project “Archipelagic Imperatives: Shipwreck and Lifesaving in Modern European Societies since 1800”. His sub-project focusses on the role of visual culture in the historical genealogies of lifesaving at sea, particularly engaging with the interrelation of technological and aesthetic experience. Working at the intersections of cultural history, critical theory and visual culture, his research is marked by a sustained interest in the role of the sea and maritime technologies in the making of the modern world. His 2023 Book Imperial Steam: Modernity on the sea route to India documents the nineteenth-century introduction of steamship travel to Britain’s eastern empires, a shift embedded in a discursive nexus of technology, modernity, nature and the global.
*The lecture will be held in English.