The Abandoned boats project was put together late one night when I was looking for something interesting to do with a camera. I take photographs of kitesurfers and shells, normally, random bits of scenery, but I was looking for a particular wreck remain which I had seen somewhere in Donegal, and so posted a Help query on the photography board at boards.ie to see if anyone remembered where it was. Someone pointed me to Bunbeg and then someone else mentioned there was one in Wexford. I’ve taken pictures of rotting trawlers in SKerries County Dublin and I would not be surprised to know if there were dead boats in Rush and Lough Shinny also.
So I decided to go looking for some and asked, again on boards.ie, also on kitesurfing.ie and thepropertypin.com if any one knew about possible dead boats for me to photograph. In the space of a day I got a lot of leads – so much so that it occurred to me that I really needed to figure out how I was going to organise it.
I am not sure where I got the idea to plot them on googlemaps – I know that there is a googlemap of surfing spots floating around, but it’s not a feature of the product that I use too often. As I started getting directions to various wrecks, however, it occurred to me that plotting them on a map was the best way to go. I also thought about getting the project its own website but the wordpress.com removes the need from me to keep updating the software and the like so I figured it would be easiest to use it as a platform to record the project.
Image hosting for the project is at the abandoned boats page on pix.ie. This is the first time I have used anything other than flickr for a project like this – and I’d like to thank pix.ie for a) hosting the images and b) letting me set up a second account specifically for this project.
I don’t know what will come out of this. Maybe a few interesting photographs, and a part of me would like to see a book come out of it. So far, I don’t really have the photographs, but I am starting to get ideas. This site is like a noticeboard for the project; I will be posting the images here, stories about what I want to do with the wrecks and a camera, stories about going to shoot them, other photographs that I am inspired by (or links to them anyway).
If anyone wants to get involved, the project has a twitter page at twitter/abandonedboats. If I am going shooting for the project I will update the twitter for it and if anyone is interested in coming along, a response to the twitter would be good. I am looking at setting up a page for the project on FaceBook but it will not consist of photographs too much because of FaceBooks onerous terms and conditions.
You can contact me at treasasubs [at] eircom.net.
