Todd R. Forsgren

Seeing Seafood

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea paints Santiago, the ‘old man’ and a lifelong fisherman, as locked in a tragic and romantic struggle with nature that culminates in a one-on-one battle between him and a giant fish. It pushes his body to its limits and leads to the desecration of the marlin, eaten by sharks because it was too large for him to pull onto the boat after he killed it. When he finally makes it back to port, few who see the carcass of the fish have any idea what the old man went through...

The book strikes me as ironic in a number of ways. There is the futility of his struggle, of course, since the fish was eaten by sharks. More importantly in reflecting on the environmental issues, prior to catching the fish, the old man had an eighty-four-day streak of “bad luck” when he hadn’t caught anything, pushing him to take his boat farther and farther out to sea. But perhaps that “bad luck” was caused by over-fishing, rather than chance. Near the end of the book, Santiago laments that, “fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive.” To me, this line perfectly exemplifies the romantic tragedy of the fisherman’s struggle, like the joy of Sisyphus.

The issue of overfishing is a crisis that will tragically affect more than one billion humans who depend on the oceans for their food (and the many billion more who eat seafood regularly. Weak international law governing the oceans has exacerbated it (i.e. the US embargo of Cuba has made conservation of marlins such as that in The Old Man in the Sea much more challenging). Climate change and continued growth of human populations are certain to increase these stresses.

Like many in this day and age (and most who are likely to see these photographs), I get most of my food from the grocery store or a market. So, the idea of commercial fishing and fish farming is quite abstract to me. When I encounter seafood, it is quite different from the fish swimming in the ocean. These images examine how preparation of fish is a form of abstraction, removing it more and more from its environment to, at the height of such abstraction, rendering it into the form of a ‘stick.’