Contested Waters: Power and Politics Across the Mediterranean

IN 1989, Hiroshi Sugimoto looked out over the Mediterranean Sea from Cassis to make one of his now-familiar seascape photographs. Shot from an elevated vantage point, the picture is half occupied by featureless water, below an equally featureless sky. No culture, no politics, no people, no land, no aircraft, no boats. Uncannily calm and eventless, the image evokes an almost-primordial past. It also invites any projections we may have of the very real facts of the sea’s present. It is hardly as if nothing happens in the Mediterranean.

Sugimoto’s photograph could hang in an exhibition about minimalism or about the cosmic spirituality of water or the fraught politics of the region. For a photograph, context is not everything but it is a lot, since the photographic image has no way of explaining what it visually describes, no way of asserting particular meanings, and no way of accounting for what might have motivated its creation. This is why photographers – and writers on photography – are often so keen to supply the missing intentions and back stories, speaking over and on behalf of that stubborn muteness, which is also a kind of radical openness. Seas are somewhat like this, too.

Even the name ‘Mediterranean’ is at once specific and elusive. Derived from the Latin mer mediterraneum (sea in the middle of the land), it carries a distant echo of the geological fact that it was once a sea which dried up completely six million years ago, only to flood again. Its present-day complexity becomes more apparent on a map. Trace your finger anticlockwise from the clenched jaw of the Mediterranean Sea, eastward along the north African coast, and back westward around the meandering southern edge of Europe to that anomalous British territory at Spain’s southern tip, and you lasso the impossible. Tangier, Oran, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Alexandria, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Mersin, Antalya, Rhodes, Athens, Valletta, Palermo, Marseille, Barcelona, Gibraltar. The rush of ideas and mental impressions held in this circumference is incommensurable, and the subject risks losing all useful meaning to lean instead on vague romances of the sea.

THE ARTIST AND WRITER ALLAN SEKULA picked up on this tendency to gloss over the politics of the sea with comforting poetics. In 1990 the oil tanker Exxon Valdez, which had spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska a year earlier, was undergoing post-repair tests in San Diego harbour, California. To erase its notoriety, it was being renamed Exxon Mediterranean. Evoking a mythic sea 11,000 kilometres from the catastrophe was never going to be enough, especially with ‘Exxon’ still in its name. In Sekula’s gloomily un-Californian photograph, the vessel hulks like a paroled criminal hoping for a new identity in the far-off sun. Good weather has long been at the core of North American and Northern European idealizations of the Mediterranean. Vacations. Warm waters. Relaxation. The image was included in Sekula’s book and exhibition ‘Fish Story’ (1995). 30 years on, this photo-text epic of the sea stands as something of a stubborn prophecy, with its cautionary tales of trade wars, dangerous voyages of migration and ecological damage. While the myths of the Mediterranean persist in tourist propaganda, the region’s condition as a space of extraction, exploitation, difficult labour and geopolitical instability is now much more difficult to ignore.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA, a resident of Miami Beach, depicts trouble in various wealthy paradises around the world. In 2022, sponsored by the high-end camera manufacturer Leica, she was in the monied playground of Monaco, that sovereign state on the riviera of fortress Europe. At the sea’s edge, she photographed downwards through lush vegetation as if from an overgrown castle. We see the azure water and the prow of a pleasure boat. The framing is pretty and the palette gorgeous, but the precipitous angle is just a little unsettling. An active mind will know the water that laps here also laps far less pampered parts of the Mediterranean. It’s the way a sea connects disparate places that gives it an unstable and disruptive power. It can sweep you away. Samoylova’s View from a Cliff, Monaco could be idyllic or nightmarish. She has made her name of late with knowing and calculated imagery benign enough to hang comfortably on the walls of those whose values she might just be criticising. Without captions her photographs permit one reading, then another. The word ‘Monaco’ in the title here could be enough to seduce her clientele into buying a print, while signalling something more damning to the rest of us. In these days of art as activism, the idea that ambiguity – unemphatic, risky, prone to complicity – could make for effective critique does not sit well with politically minded audiences wanting a clear position. But ambiguity is, in many ways, art’s most subversive if overlooked quality. It is also photography’s root condition.

IT IS 1,500 KILOMETRES FROM MONACO TO SICILY, the Italian island at the heart of Daniel Castro Garcia’s decade-long project, ‘I Peri N’Tera’. In 2015, the photographer was shocked at the BBC’s unsympathetic and racially stereotyping news coverage of two boats that overturned in waters between Libya and Italy, leaving hundreds dead. It prompted Castro Garcia’s layered account of migration and the lives it impacts. His project title is a Sicilian colloquialism meaning, ‘Keep your feet on the ground.’ He got to know 12 boys who had been rescued during dangerous sea crossings from north Africa, and were living in the Zingale-Aquino Reception Centre for Unaccompanied Minors in Enna, Sicily, where they awaited relocation. Castro Garcia’s photographs and short films move between documentary realism and metaphor, but he is always alert to what Walter Benjamin called the ‘dialectical image’, in which the paradoxes of a situation become startlingly clear. In his video Ibra and the Rescue Mission (2017), Castro Garcia collaborates with a young man named Ibra, originally from Gambia. He films Ibra as he watches on his phone a YouTube clip of a search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean, much like the one that brought him to Sicily. Ibra would view this footage over and over. It helped him to work through his trauma, allowing him to focus on his dream of joining Médecins Sans Frontières and aiding in the rescue of others. Castro Garcia invites us to watch Ibra watching this harrowing imagery with its unexpectedly cathartic purpose.

THERE IS A SIMILAR DOUBLE REGISTER in Alex Majoli’s trans-national project, SCENE (2011–19). Majoli takes his cue from Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, first performed in 1921. Its plot concerns a theatre director and actors who, while rehearsing, are interrupted by strangers. The presence of these strangers, with their complicated relationships and difficult pasts, forces the director to rewrite the script to accommodate them. The play is more than a theatrical game: Pirandello is interested in our relation to the demands of strangers and the adjustments we are obliged to make. How do we reset the ‘plot’ of our life, our society? The play within a play opens up an unexpected space to consider these issues.

A large part of Majoli’s SCENE concerns migration and, in 2015, he was based on the Greek island of Lesbos, which for reasons to do with European Union policy had become an eastern gateway for those wishing to enter Europe from Turkey. With a background in photojournalism, Majoli was searching for ways to balance the medium’s supposedly privileged access to actuality with something more theatrical that might counter the default visualizations of migrant and refugee experience. He took to using incredibly bright, off-camera flash in daylight, exposing for the highlights, and letting the rest of the scene fall into soupy darkness. His black and white images, some of which show people scrambling ashore from small boats, temper the evident urgency with something between crepuscular moonlight and an indoor stage. Yes, this approach runs the risk of inflecting real tragedy with art, but we’d do well to ask ourselves what kind of light is acceptable in photographs of such situations, if Majoli’s is not. Flash is part of most photojournalists’ tool kits, although generally it is used to fill in shadows, not transform the entire picture.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN ADAM ROUHANA also aim to resist familiar representations, although they could not look more naturalistic and easy going, but that’s precisely their point. His primary subject is everyday life in contemporary Palestine: its pleasures, its moments of imaginative freedom, the unlikely joys and bursts of good humour that are hard-won and cherished amid the ongoing brutalities. We have all seen images of Palestinian death and devastation. Rouhana’s photographs often show scenes of light relief, which in itself seems a determinedly political act of resistance and hope. Against the constant demonizing and dehumanizing, what could be more openhearted and human than joy and play? Some of Rouhana’s most ebullient images are of children and young adults having fun in the sea. Gaza has 40 kilometres of Mediterranean coastline. The sea here is itself an intensely militarized zone, with boat traffic and fishing constantly in the cross hairs.

Several years in the making, Rouhana’s project, titled ‘Before Freedom’ (2022–ongoing) and due to be published as a photobook soon, also includes scenes of occupation, colonization and the daily infringements that have made Palestinian life intolerable for so long now. What does it mean to make a book in the midst of such horror? Books carry with them a sense of posterity, of unknown audiences yet to be. That’s why we want to make them. And while we may own books, there is an implicit sense that they will not be destroyed, but will outlive us. We can say the same of magazines, websites or exhibitions, all of which feel more like finite events in time that come and go. As the photographer Dayanita Singh once put it, ‘A book is a conversation with a stranger in the future’.

DOCUMENTARY FORM HAS REENGAGED ITS EXPERIMENTAL ROOTS over the last generation or so, coming close to British filmmaker John Grierson’s founding definition from 1928: ‘The creative treatment of actuality with a social purpose.’ Form is no longer a given, and this seems particularly so in contemporary representations of the Mediterranean. Exactly how it is to be pictured is by no means clear, or obvious. If there is a recurring motif across the great range of attempts to come to terms with the subject, it is the boat or ship. From overloaded crafts carrying migrants, to tankers, container ships, fishing vessels, tourist liners and military boats, nothing else seems capable of registering the movements – local and global, physical and economic – that make the region such a flashpoint. The late Jean Luc-Godard shot the first third of his drama documentary feature Film Socialisme (2010) on a real Mediterranean cruise liner, the Costa Concordia. A sort of seafaring Las Vegas, the ship – a limbo of unreal luxury – allowed Godard to string together observational and fictional material in a shifting film essay. The passengers included a United Nations official, a Russian detective, a war criminal and the bourgeoisie’s go-to bohemian poet-musician, Patti Smith. The ship docked in various ports but the consumer experience was fleeting, disconnected and bleakly alienated. Upon its initial release, this was also what I thought of Film Socialisme itself. It teases with occasionally profound insights into the complex determinations of modern life, while tipping into an incoherent cacophony of references and allusions. Two years later, I saw news footage of the Costa Concordia on its side in shallow waters off Italy’s Isola del Giglio. Its captain was soon prosecuted for manslaughter. Amid the geopolitical turmoil that was leading to the awful deaths at sea of so many migrants, 32 people lost their lives on a capsized luxury cruise ship. Suddenly, the mess of Godard’s movie made much more sense. A decade on, Film Socialisme seems to be undergoing something of a reappraisal as one of the more telling accounts of the multiple and conflicting determinants of the Mediterranean today.

ONE OF THE INSTABILITIES OF LENS-BASED IMAGES that we seem to take for granted is their loose way with scale. Not only do they show us things reduced (and sometimes enlarged), but the image itself can be scaled according to use. One moment it’s an Instagram post, then a billboard, then a page of a book or a magazine. Such promiscuity seems so normal that it takes a special kind of presentation to make us think about it. In 2001, Paola Pivi made Alicudi Project, a 1:1 sized photograph of a volcanic island north of Sicily. Although Alicudi is small, at about three kilometres wide, only a fraction of the complete image – which would require 3,750 scrolls, measuring a total of 500 x 1822.5 metres – can be exhibited at any one time. It’s an absurdist work but, like all good absurdism, there is something profound about it. In 2022, as curator of the exhibition ‘Actual Size! Photography at Life Scale’ at the International Center of Photography in New York, I presented two scrolls from Pivi’s Alicudi Project on the double-height wall of the main gallery – one of the few venues large enough to take them. Although pixelated, the image clearly showed a section of the island’s steep, rocky cliffside. One day, I brought a friend to see it. She looked it up and down and said: ‘Imagine coming all the way across the Mediterranean by boat and having to climb that …’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Mythic Shores’

^{Main image: Anastasia Samoylova, View from a Cliff, Monaco (detail), 2022, photograph, 81 × 102 cm. Courtesy: the artist}