On the first day of the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference in Seattle, I walked uptown to the Sheraton hear Morris Dees talk about the history of the Southern Poverty Law Center. On route, I found myself surrounded by a sea of people in turtle suits, if not a sea, then a substantial cluster.
They were in town to represent the ocean, which didn’t have a representative at the conference. By the time I left the hotel,
the turtles had company: labor unions, other environmentalists,
progressive religious groups, anarchists from Eugene, police,
reporters, press photographers and TV camera crews.
Joe Hill, who’d advised, “Don’t mourn for America – organize,” would
have been proud. The 1999 battle in Seattle brought together a wide spectrum of forces to protest a common if abstract foe – unregulated, free market Capitalism.
Allan Sekula ‘s interest in the event set him apart from journalists seeking peak moments or critical points of revealation.
I hoped to describe the attitudes of people waiting, unarmed, sometimes
deliberately naked in the winter chill, for the gas and the rubber
bullets and the concussion grenades. There were moments of civic
solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival.
Again, something very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a
movement founded in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the
city streets against the abstraction of global capital.
Wrote Richard Lacayo:
In this moment of triumphant capitalism, of planetary cash flows and a
priapic Dow, all the second thoughts and outright furies about the
global economy collected on the streets of downtown Seattle and crashed
through the windows of Nike Town. After two days of uproar scented with
tear gas and pepper spray, the world may never again think the same way
about free trade and what it costs.
Ten photos from 30 in Sekula’s series, titled, Waiting for Tear Gas, are at the Henry Gallery through Jan. 31. Because the series is a narrative, it would have been swell to see all 30, but the 10 in the hallway are riveting. The cheap charm of their carny glamor does not obscure their heart.
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