A maritime album

the long version

This book depicts the relationships of mariners with their vessels and the sea. Each photograph chronicles a fragment of the mariner's experience over the past 200 years - shipbuilding, the making of a wooden skiff, commercial fishing and whaling, amateur sailing, deep-sea diving, naval encounters, and much more. In his introduction, John Szarkowski shares his artistic rationale for selecting the particular images that appear in this book. Benson's essays, which accompany the photographs, unify image and story in a vignette of time and place, of historical, societal, and individual meaning. This book is the catalogue for a traveling exhibition that will open in December 1997 at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia.