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ss
Amerikanis, New York, July 1975
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I
have impetuously grabbed my father's old Bell & Howell 35mm,
snapped up sixty rolls of Tri-X, bought a jar of peanut butter
and a loaf of bread, and headed out alone on the road.
I
do not realize the importance of testing your gear before a
big job, and it doesn't occur to me that, in the near decade
that this little camera had lain idle, something has gone wrong.
My pictures,
all 2160 of them, came out badly overexposed, with a rare few
exceptions.
It was
a photographer's nightmare: Tri-X, the most light-sensitive
film I could buy at the time, is
inclined to be grainy to begin with, and overexposing it was
a disastrous mistake. After a few test prints I saw it was hopeless,
put the near-black negatives into neat sleeves and Capro negative
files, and proceeded to forget about them.
The ship
visits were a set of fond and vivid memories; the photos irretrievable,
I thought.
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It is
the summer of 1975. I have bought a two-month Greyhound
Ameripass™, and am trying to visit every major sea
port in North America I can get to in just sixty days.
This
quest entails learning how to sleep on a long sour series
of diesel-grumbling Dogcruisers which reek of nicotine and
the small room, cutting great swaths across the country
to meet the ships I want to see. My first stop is Miami;
then I bus it up to Seattle in a single trip broken only
by a six-hour layover in Chicago, where I buy a bag of sliders,
walk around the river, and fall in first love with the city
I now call home.
I
lived at the time in landlocked Atlanta, Georgia. The trip
was an effort to compensate for the long eight years since
I had been on a passenger vessel of any note. Just before
my senior year in high school, my books and photographs
and those microfilmed editions of the New York papers were
no longer enough for me. I had to break out and see the
ships.
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Canadian Pacific docks, British Columbia, Junr 1975
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Time
passes. A quarter century of moves, and the pictures
move with me: through college days, first job,
a move to San Francisco, a move to Boston, a move
to Chicago, buying a house, buying a scanner with
a 35mm adapter, and I turn to the Capro notebooks
once again.
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As the images came to light after 25 years I
was still disappointed in most of them, but
I had more options on the computer than photographic
paper would allow. My scanning has become a
rescue mission, a walking back through time;
I had forgotten ships that I had visited in
port, and even the scenes I remembered took
on a look of a long-past era, like the earliest
crude pinhole exposures.
Below
are some of the scenes I could salvage from
the trip.
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aft verandah, ms Mikhail Lermontov, ss Leonardo
da Vinci in background, New York, July 1975
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I
have always particularly loved the fantail view, the after decks
of a ship: the wide expanse of teak, the glimpse into interior
spaces. Here the Soviet Lermontov is in from a northerly
European trip; the great Italian liner behind her is about to
depart on one to the South. The way we went, 1975.
Here,
the heavily digitally-driven correction of my overexposure (the
day was not foggy, but sunny) has lent a ghostly aura to Leo
that sadly is appropriate. 1975 was one of the last years of
the Italian Line's regular run along the Southern Route to Europe.
In
the First Class Main Lounge of Leonardo da Vinci a teenage
boy removes his shirt. "What are ya, Tarzan?" his
father says. "Put that back on."
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ss Gripsholm Main Lounge, New York, July 1975
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Oddly, with the
exteriors so overexposed, the interiors come out decent, if a little
soft. Above, we are on board the Swedish-American Line Gripsholm.
Her
departure was one of the more memorable that I witnessed that summer;
a festive sendoff to Europe with a brass band playing, streamers, all
the artifacts of the way we went. While on board I went to the Dining
Room and asked for menu souvenirs; a kind steward there gave me a set
of blanks featuring the Swedish-American liners of the past.
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Despite
some impressive activity in New York, in 1975 cruise ships are more
common than ocean liners. And it is a different day of cruise travel,
before coming the mega-ships. The first Wärtsilä-built vessels
have appeared on the scene: the ground-breaking fleet of a young energetic
Norwegian outfit called Royal Caribbean Cruise Line, but the bulk
of the business is carried in a series of ships that had their origins
elsewhere, chiefly liner voyages. Above is one of the hardest-working
passenger ships ever, which sailed under eight names. Maritime chronicler
Peter Knego has a fine article
about her on Martin Cox' MaritimeMatters site.
This
was a time when Carnival Cruise Line, present-day cruising's 1000-lb
gorilla, consisted of but one ship, Mardi Gras, which had plied
the North Atlantic as Empress of Canada. To save money converting
the vessel, line founder Ted Arison kept the original Canadian Pacific
logo pattern on the funnel, replacing its green, white and black with
red, white and blue. The logo did change shape subtly over the years,
but this was a case where any team of expensive branding consultants
would have been hard-pressed to come up with a more recognizable and
striking design -- and this one began with the cutting of a corner.
ss Mardi Gras arriving Miami, June 1975
My
Itinerary:
Atlanta
Miami/Port Everglades
Seattle
Victoria BC
Vancouver BC
San Francisco
Los Angeles/Long Beach
New York
Detroit
Louisville
New Orleans
Atlanta
In my cabin on the Queen Mary Hotel, June 1975.
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