Practice-based PhD, work-in-progress

Photography and Seafaring:

Making Visible Maritime Bodies and Spaces of Contemporary Trading Routes

 

Unreal Estate: The Panama Chapter

 

This work is a response to my first piece of fieldwork at the Panama Canal and the global financial systems influenced by this oceanic shortcut. Juxtaposed against the human lived experience of seafarers, here, I consider the incredibly complex and pervasive macro picture of world trade and globalisation through the lens of the Panama Canal, a visible chokepoint for the geopolitics of shipping.

 

In January 2025, I visited the canal. I was looking for somewhere where International shipping and its global tendrils are in full view. By connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic and cutting 7,800 miles off the trip from New York to San Francisco, the Canal has proven itself invaluable to commerce and politics. During the last century, more than one million ships passed through the Canal, yet I also wanted to study how this vital waterway for the global economy affected Panama and what a closer connection with the modern maritime industry could reveal.

 

The images explore the towers of Panama City as both a physical and symbolic architecture of secrecy and illusion. Inspired by the revelations of the Panama Papers, the work examines the city’s skyscrapers not only as concrete manifestations of global capital but also as imagined spaces, monuments to opacity, fiction, and power. For 100 years, the US profited from running the canal, while Panama sought other ways to attract investment into the country. Many luxury apartments were purchased as speculative stores of value, often unoccupied, contributing to one of the highest urban inequality rates in the Americas. The result: empty, dark skyscrapers.

 

By blending documentary and constructed imagery, it mirrors the ethical ambiguity behind wealth and its concealment, exploring whether this approach to photography can make visible an idea of a place while still referencing its physicality.