The work, in three parts, explores my experiences as a cruise ship photographer, over 7 months ‘acting’ in the role I was able to go relatively unnoticed as I observed documenting life on board.  Initially I feel I began taking photographs almost as a means of survival, so I didn’t loose my identity to the job, but I also wanted to capture the strangeness of living in a large ship and document areas I knew I would one day not have access to. I have photographed myself against an unfamiliar, transient environment and recorded all aspects of cruise ship life that I encountered, the title of the work describes the blasts of the ships horn in an emergency, which is the international signal to abandon ship.

Through my position I became interested in the tradition of posed formal portraits and working as a commercial photographer I found myself chasing these ‘perfect’ images depicting artificial, temporary elegance and false smiles.  Through self portraits I reveal the studio set-ups, backdrops and myself as photographer, exploring the illusion these images are intended to document as reality.  

I’m also interested in the images which didn’t fulfil the criteria I was trained to look for in a supposed successful photographs, the images which in any other portrait studio would be deleted in camera, or disposed of before they reached the sitters eyes. These ‘Professional Portraits’ fail in their original intent but through the photographers clumsy posing and oversights are much more valuable. But can we assume these mistakes were made in innocence?

Journal Culture Magazine Article

Vision Magazine Article