For the last several years, I created the Pictures of the Floating World portfolio while accompanying my mother on six-star luxury line cruises (these ships are populated by society’s elite and captains of industry). I found myself in an unfamiliar world, a world well beyond the first-class curtain on airplanes. The rarified and archaic traditions observed aboard contemporary cruise ships, the sheer numbers of powerful individuals at play and the voluminous consumption of gourmet food and spirits are repellant and addictive. This is not the environment depicted in commercials for Royal Caribbean or on the television program Shipmates. It is more like Masterpiece Theater; two week cruises replete with four to five formal attire evenings, lectures by presidents of major auction houses and Mars Lander geologists, libraries, food and wine lectures, escargots and caviar.
I infiltrate the boundaries of their floating world and ferret out the tender and broken, as well as the forceful and arrogant. The people I’ve met, in a deliberate desire to completely vacate, I suppose, rarely if ever converse on the intellectual level of which most must be capable, given their financial acumen. But in the end, their gluttony, loneliness, affectations and rabid humanity is what interests me. Their identity becomes an assumed persona in the context of a brief artificially intense ‘friendships’, for lack of better words, between ships forever self-determined to pass again and again in the night.
Colleen Mullins received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA from San Francisco State University. She has exhibited nationally and received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, McKnight Photography Fellowship and a project grant from the Women’s Studio Workshop. She worked as the gallery director/curator for the Minnesota Center for Photography in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is now a freelance curator, and has taught photography and book arts at the University of Minnesota for ten years.