prologue: UNSEEN IMAGES FROM CARGO

In Cargo, I didn’t show the more intimate moments of life on the ship, in order to respect the privacy of the sailors. Twenty-four years have passed and I found myself rewatching the unseen footage, while preparing material for this website.

With sincere gratitude to Mr Abuela, Arleen, Bosun, Cookie, Ellie, Mikey, Nelson, Nino, Raoul, Rollie, Romeo, Wickslaw, the fitters, the oilers and the first engineer for the kindness and warmth they showed me during the weeks that we spent together.

“The sailors explained that it was okay for me to film because they didn’t believe that a woman would ever manage to shoot a film about them. I only had a small prosumer camera with me, a type of video camera also used by tourists, and that was already familiar to some of them; and this contributed to their impression that I was a sort of amateur, and different to a man with a camera. It allowed me to penetrate their world and to live among them, and to film as I wished. If I had arrived on board with a large 35mm or 16mm camera and a crew, the film would not have been possible.”

Without DV My Work Would be Unthinkable by Laura Waddington

“One of the sailors said to me, if you travel to the edges, you can never fully return to the centre and what changes inside you, cannot be communicated in words or images. It took me a long time to understand him.”

Scattered Truth part 2b by Laura Waddington

“There was no seeming rationale to the orders they were receiving. They would set course for somewhere and then suddenly a new order would arrive instructing them to sail in a completely different direction, or to turn off the engines and float for days. No one bothered to provide them with an explanation.“

Without DV My Work Would be Unthinkable by Laura Waddington

Wickslaw’s PHOTOS

Wickslaw was an enthusiast, and one of the few members of the crew who didn’t describe feeling imprisoned on the ship. Sitting in the small TV room reserved for the ship‘s engineers, he would recount stories for hours about his sea experiences, the treacherous storms that he had weathered on the Atlantic and the Black Sea, and his beloved family back home. An acute observer, ever curious, he kept a list in the back of his dictionary of every one of the hundreds of ports that he had visited in the previous eleven years.

More to follow.