c-print, Medium format

©by Bchory Frish Photographer

TRANS-PORT

The 13th of January 2005 I joined a merchant ship by the name of Nirenga, including 16 ship men most of them where Ukrainian except the Russian chef, each one with its own job. For the next three and a half weeks I will come aquatinted with the ships life, and the work that has to be done for making this massive ship to succeed its mission. We started at Ashdod pier and sailed to Novorossiysk Russia, Burgos Bulgaria, then back home. I wanted to run away to a place where no one understood my language and I didn’t understand theirs just trying to communicate, with out any words. Leaving land, its clear boundaries and stability, finding myself surrounded by water, and its ever lasting movement. Submissive to the waves, pounding on the side panels of the ship... Trying to understand... The ship may well be a symbol for departure.

it is, at a deeper level, the emblem of closure. An inclination for ships always means the joy of perfectly enclosing oneself of having at hand the greatest possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal an absolutely finite space. To like ships is unremittingly closed and not at all vague sailings into the unknown A ship is a habitat before being a means of transport. “The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned it becomes a traveling eye, which comes close to the infinite it.”  (ROLAND BARTHES MYTHOLOGIES The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat)

“Suddenly, all the masks fall off me, and I’m in a blanket, snuggled in the middle of the sea, the bed continues to swing, and I feel like a baby inside the womb, full of freshmemories,that rise like a slow movie, in the good times and in a time of sadness and different excitements. The memories float and rise as new, the smell and the little details, and it goes on all through the night. I open my eyes, and they appear again.” (The sixteenth day – from my personal diary)