I began to research photography philosophy and discovered Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Why am I so consumed with taking photographs in the first place? There is a transformation from the boat in the canal to the boat in the photograph but what does that represent? Is photography limited to only capturing fragments of the past? How does photography relate to death, time and memory? Does the photograph speak the truth or does it lie? Is it possible to create a new paradigm for photography to expand its visual language to include new developments in philosophy and technology? The boats became a metaphor for death, time and memory. I could compare photographs and see the changes that time’s decay had wrought. I began to notice that some had decayed more over time, new weeds and junk filled the cockpits, some had sunk, some had disappeared entirely and new ones had taken their place. Over the years, I began to revisit places where I remembered that I had taken photographs of specific boats.
I have photographed them for many years and I have a large archive of images. I began to search for more dead boats and found them everywhere. I felt as if I had hit upon a new image, one that avoided the tourist cliches of the bridges, the canals, the boats, the brown canal houses, the cafes, the bikes and the pretty girls. I had never seen a photograph of a dead boat in Amsterdam. It made me melancholy to think that she was once a beautiful boat that carried her passengers to the other shore but now, with the passage of time, she will never sail again she is abandoned and dead.
I saw an old boat, abandoned, half-submerged, trash in the cockpit, weeds growing in the hull, her name faded by the sun and the sea. One day quite some time ago, I was walking in Amsterdam and happened to look down into one of the canals.
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