1The two volumes comprising Ground Sea gather the outcomes of a vast research project that Hilde Van Gelder has been working on since 2014. Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools/The Docker’s Museum, to which the American artist and theorist dedicated the last three years of his life (2010-2013), served as the catalyst for the project. Sekula’s work as a photographer, filmmaker, theorist and writer, acts as a touchstone for the entire project of Ground Sea and links it to Van Gelder’s other publications, including Disassembled Images: Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art (2019), also published by Leuven University Press (edited together with Alexander Streitberger).

2The historical context of Ground Sea relates to the events triggered by the influx of displaced persons into Europe in 2015 that included closing of the national borders, increases of police violence, and the rise of defensive nationalism. These events exposed irrevocable contradictions existing between state policies on race, immigration and ethnicity and the quest for an integrated national identity. Ground Sea makes a significant contribution to these debates as it raises the issue of human rights and the role of photography in the ongoing violation of fundamental freedoms. It is thus concerned with what Sekula called the “traffic in photographs”: the “social production, circulation, and reception of photographs in a society based on commodity production and exchange”.

3Van Gelder questions the legitimacy of the global regime of human rights that utilises photographic representation as much as other means of personal identification, including fingerprinting, that go against “the very foundations of present-day civil society and the confidence that we can allow ourselves to have in it”. This problematic is set within the wider challenges as a result of the anthropogenic climate change that cause land to be submerged under water, forcing displacement and migration. “How, then, as a photo-art historian, can one credibly contribute to developing a substantiated case for a non-imperialistically defined water‑boundedness within today’s predicament? How should this study, Ground Sea, contribute to seeing the water-bounds not as our planet’s outcasts […] but instead as heralds of hope for a reimagined future on Earth?”

4One of the answers lies in developing a study of photographs that are “as minimally complicit with the global capitalism’s systemic logic as possible”. The author’s entry points are those liminal zones where “the land touches the sea or where the sea, in various guises, nourishes the land”. Van Gelder centres her study on the border landscape around the former refugee and migrant camp in Calais, the Channel Tunnel, the Strait of Dover and the wider seascape of the North Sea.

5These territories are explored first-hand through numerous fieldtrip visits, and the author integrates her notes, travels snaps, documents and other personal material into the structure of the book. Van Gelder designates some of these elements as “doodles”, which underlines the aleatory, informal, and inscrutable nature of this material, that appear alongside more traditional presentation of research, historical information and visual analysis. The author claims for these “doodles” the role of “transitional objects” that assisted her in the process of shaping of the ideas and formulation of the proposals. Such writing combines private and public, personal and political in ways that harks back to the writings of authors such as W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes. Indeed, both Sebald and Barthes figure prominently in Ground Sea, and their texts form a part of a vast and amalgamate network of references that also includes Krzysztof Kieślowski cinema, Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thought, political philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, cultural critique of Alexander Kluge and Walter Benjamin’s, and social anthropology of Tim Ingold, among many others. Methodological implications of interweaving of personal and political in Van Gelder’s text, and the emphasis on the supplementary nature of the “doodle” are significant for photography and its scholarship, and especially in the context of social documentary tradition, and represent one of the most striking aspects of this publication.

6Sekula’s work provided the author with the general schema, while contemporary artistic responses that allowed her to study in detail the contested territory of the Strait of Dover and people passing through it. The representative examples include photography and films of Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue. The artistic responses are presented as a critical alternative to the representations circulating in the media, which typically offer a limited stock of images, notably those of invasion of “fortress Europe,” and those of perilous flight. Van Gelder is thus clearly concerned with the complicity of the photographic image — and photojournalism and documentary photography specifically — with the regime of representation that stands uncomfortably close to the structures of power that control and repress.

7For Van Gelder, Bruno Serralongue’s documentary project Calais (2006-2018) opposes this representational regime, and provides an alternative through its focus on the everyday reality of living in provisional camps and a complex, multipart structure of visual and spatial presentation, notably within the context of the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2019-2020. Sylvain George’s feature-length documentaries, including notably Qu’ils reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre) (2007-2010), is another example used by Van Gelder. It similarly focuses on the living conditions in the camps, as well as gestures and bodies of the exiles with their potential for rebellion and emancipation. These are some of the most powerful examples of the recent artworks responding to Calais as a highly charged socio-political space, and their connection to Sekula’s work is clearly delineated. At the same time, given the wealth of female voices grappling with the questions of migration and displacement in the context of Calais (Séverine Sajous, Laura Hanno, Elisa Larvego, among many others), Van Gelder’s focus on case studies produced by male artists requires an elaboration, especially since social documentary remains overwhelmingly a male-dominated field.

8The possibility of a return to the safety of “Ground Land” is foreclosed, concludes Van Gelder. She uses Bruno Latour’s definition “Ground Land” to designate “reactionary populist nationalisms involving relatively small parts of territory as native soil to be claimed”. The conception of “Ground Sea” is offered in its place as a space of possibility of imagining another kind of “landing.” She writes: “I observe Ground Sea as a domain that, however elusively, informs us how to prepare for what is to come.” This future-oriented endeavour takes on, with courage and humility, our present global challenges of human rights, national identification, migration, climate change and surveillance technology to imagine a world in which each person can claim “the right to be reborn”.