The Corporeal Life of Seafaring, published by MACK, considers the global shipping economy from the position of the people whose bodies sustain it. Laleh Khalili combines an extended essay with her own photographs, drawing on research and experience travelling aboard cargo ships. Rather than treating maritime commerce as an abstract system of routes, commodities and vessels, the book attends to the hands, legs, eyes, flesh and spirits engaged in its daily operation.

Its subject is work at sea under conditions marked by isolation, loneliness, loss, violence, stolen wages and exploitative shipowners. Yet Khalili also records brief instances of pleasure and solidarity. The ship emerges as a concentrated social and institutional space, where longstanding maritime traditions meet the power structures of contemporary commerce, and where racialised and gendered hierarchies shape both labour and vulnerability. The seafarer’s body becomes the point at which these forces can be read most clearly.

The book’s distinctive force lies in its combination of scholarly and literary accounts with carefully observed photographic material. Khalili’s images do not stand apart from the argument as simple illustration; they extend an inquiry into the physical realities of labour and the institutions that organise seafarers’ lives. The result is a compact but layered work, attentive to material detail while keeping the wider divisions and dependencies of the world economy in view.

For collectors interested in photography that joins documentary attention to critical writing, this volume offers a focused study of an often overlooked workforce and of the systems that depend upon it. As part of MACK’s DISCOURSE series, it is especially notable for the way a theorist’s sustained text and photographs operate together, giving the book both analytical precision and a close, human scale.