Claudio Cambon took these photos in 1997/98 when he joined the last voyage of the US tanker SS Minole from Baton Rouge to a breaker's yard in Chittagong, Bangladesh. A slightly unusual book because as well as photos of the voyage and beak-up Cambon also wrote the text that fills fifty-three pages after the photos. The ship had four names since it was launched in 1961: Stanvac Meridian; 1962 Mobil Meridian; 1990 Seminole: 1991 Minole (minus the Se of Seminole). Page seven has a photo of a lady smashing the traditional bottle of bubbly against the bow.
I thought the photos of the voyage and crew rather ordinary, nothing of the engine room, bridge. cabins et cetera but Cambon's work comes alive with his shots of taking the ship apart, basically by hand back then. The gas cutters get to work cutting the steel into ever smaller pieces until they can be man-handled onto trucks and carted away for recycling. There's a two page fold-out with sixteen photos, taken over five months, showing the Minole getting smaller and smaller.
The breaker yards in Bangladesh are the poor cousins of those in India, principally centered in Alang and Gadani in Pakistan, there the workers mostly wear hard hats and gloves and crawler cranes help pull ships apart. Since 1998 the workers lot has probably improved in Bangladesh but as labor is cheap and plenty of it it's a slow process.
Thanks so much, Robin, for your thoughtful review. The interior of the ship wasn't too much my thing, unfortunately, much as I tried to mine those spaces for images, as they were indeed impressive. I spent a good bit of time in there, and also did a number of crew portraits in, for example, the engine room, but somehow what came out the best was always outside. So it goes... Thanks again!
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