Mensch und Arbeit

Beached Former Soviet Icebreaker, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 1998, gedruckt 2014, Archival inkjet print, 50×40 cm
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a point of commencement, because the ship provided many
materials necessary to their country’s struggle to create a modern
existence for itself. The death of one man’s livelihood became the
birth of another’s.
However, more than a ship was exchanged in this process. To all
of them she was not just a carrier of cargo, but an emblem of life
itself; like all living things she decomposed, and her recycled ele-
ments formed the basis of new organisms: a hull became building
rebar, a machete, a drum tensioning rod, a religious statue. These
photographs give record of this transformation; they ultimately
serve as a meditation on how life possesses us more than we do it,
and how it mysteriously changes shape from one beautiful form
to another, passing through us like light through the filament of a
bulb.