Think of landscape photography with a twist. “Dreamscape” photography is my latest project.
I start by remembering a moment. This one is September 1965. I was nine years old and although now its sixty years later, I can visualize the day like it was yesterday. The sands were packed with surfers and their longboards. It looked like a giant party. It was the day, I said to myself, “When I’m a teenager, I have got to get a surfboard!”
To re-create the memory, I bought a used toy Texaco Oil Tanker on E-Bay for $20. For the ship’s name, I pressed on some letters from the art store..”.Amaryllis”. I added “rust” and graffiti to the ship with acryllic paints. The base is a piece of wood with beach sand poured over some epoxy dunes. The next step was waiting for a day when the water was clear blue and a ground swell was pouring in from the north.
The Amaryllis
For South Floridians, September is Hurricane Nail Biting month, peak of the season with a 30% chance of getting hit by a storm. Hurricane forecasting in the year nineteen sixty five was extremely primitive by today’s standards. Satellite photos of the Caribbean did not exist. Hurricane Betsy hit with only a day’s notice-likely a radio report from the Bahamas or a ship a sea. By the time local TV news began reporting, a miraculously moisture free blue sky shone with gale force winds but no clouds. Something big was about to happen, although strenght forecasting was non-existent. Until the maelstrom appeared on Miami radar, its size and intensity were anyone’s guess.
At, sea, the consequences of this lack of information would be tragic for the Greek registered freighter, Amaryllis. Traveling from Manchester England to Baton Rouge Louisiana, the captain chose a northern route above the Bahamas that required the ship turn south at the Grand Bahama Banks and for fifty miles buck the nine knot current of the powerful Gulf Stream until it motored into the Gulf of Mexico. To increase headway, he chose to tuck in close to the Florida coast (within a mile) to lessen the current’s grip.
Sometime in the night, when the gales increased to hurricane force, the ship found itself riding down the slope of thirty foot ocean swells. When the winds began gusting to nearly a hundred and fifty miles per hour, Gulf Stream current turned the now forty