Looking in the Mirror
Melissa McCarthy is interested in things that lurk. To mark the publication of her second book Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro (Sagging Meniscus Press, November 2023) Marguerite Carson and the Edinburgh-based author corresponded on the subject of shipwrecks and lurking, photographs and sharks, taking as a starting point Melissa’s top five favourite shipwrecks in art and literature.
Melissa McCarthy
1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, founder of the first English colony in North America, was returning from Newfoundland when his ship foundered and sunk off the Azores. Edward Hayes, writing around 1602, recounts the voyage, including the detail that Gilbert goes down with his ship, the Squirrel, clutching a book in his hand, crying out, ‘We are as neere to heaven by sea as by land!’ Early voyages, colonising America, these last words I find incredibly funny—it’s all here .
Marguerite Carson
It is incredibly funny. Gilbert was almost wholly incompetent, refusing to return aboard his own ship and making misguided decisions. I also read that the voyage encountered sea monsters, described in Hayes’ account as a lion that came alongside the Golden Hind, ‘sliding upon the water with his whole body’. It seems there is an interesting moment that occurs and recurs in the discovering and mapping of things, where speculation and fiction ground the imperial and so called real. Gilbert’s mission was colonial, he connects the establishment of the British Empire and British colonial project with the northwest passage, the, at the time, almost mythical pinnacle of marine exploration entangling Cook, Franklin, Tasmania and Newfoundland, all from the auspiciously-named HMS Squirrel. Gilbert took with him instruments to map the coasts and places he passed, and commissioned maps specially from John Dee, cartographer to the Queen.
MM
I’m fond of this object in the Wellcome Collection: John Dee’s scrying mirror, of blacked-out glass and a sharkskin case.[1]
MC
There’s always a shark. And the blacked out glass is an interesting companion to the glass plate process we talk about later on—the glass is black so as to make the negative appear positive. I wonder if it’s the same with scrying. Both Gilbert and Dee believed wholeheartedly in what they wanted to be there, filling in the blanks in their knowledge with assumptions and convincing others to fund and participate in their project by means of these exercises in speculative cartographics.
MM
Is this phrase perhaps another way of saying, looking in the mirror?
MC
It seems to me that in looking at early colonial exploration and the men who undertook it, we look at the slipperiness of truth and knowledge. In pinning fact to various places and bringing them under control of the imperial measurements of the compass they undermined the very belief that got them there, how were they ever to find their way back?
MM
Mike Light’s photographic work, disinterring and reframing existing photographic images from the archives of NASA or the nuclear testing. Followed by making his own aerial view, large format images: in the Bikini Atoll project (2003) of ships that were sunk in the Pacific as part of the testing. Then goes back to do his own video filming.
MC
I’m interested in the circular nature of this process, the way that Mike Light interrogates not just the actual detonation, but the documentation of it too. There is one image titled ‘Inside Radioactive Photographic Bunker Built In 1956, Aomon Island, Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, 2003’. This is the only bunker named as a photographic bunker and shot from the inside. The image is flipped, printed as negative, so that the outside is pure bright white through the round porthole like windows.
MM
There’s a good essay by Geoffrey Batchen in Photography at MoMA, 1840–1920 (2017) in which he talks about an Alfred Capel Cure image, ‘Interior of Holy Cross’, August 1853, in terms of the inside of the church being both the camera—the room—and an analogue for the camera, the piece of equipment he’s set up there. The photographer, and the viewer, are looking out of an enclosed, dark space through an aperture, a window, out into the light. I hadn’t got this far in Photo, Phyto… to be talking about architecture as photographic device. But I like it.
MC
In your book, I like that Mike Light’s Bikini Atoll and Black Bravo series in their negative format confuse the above and below, creating visual parallels, his negative clouds and the nuclear test clouds. It took me a few cycles through the series to notice the lack of mushroom clouds and explosive light, the Bikini Atoll series being the only images Light has made in conversation with his archival practice of reframing existing images. In the same way these parallels cause a disorientating flipping, the sharks seem to me to stand in for the shipwrecks that I went to the Black Bravo video to see.
The images of the tests themselves, the ones where the ghost ships (ships previously decommissioned, their images like cardboard cut-outs) were sunk, are also eerily familiar, extremely recognisable. There is something about an explosion silhouetting a collection of ships that echoes imagery of marine warfare such as in action films.
MM
Speaking of battleships, I was surprised to see a Robert Mapplethorpe image from 1983, ‘Coral Sea’,[2] neither flowers nor naked men, is a platinum print of this eponymous aircraft carrier, sunk down low on the page under a weight of foggy sky.
MM
Gibson and Sons of Scilly is a collection of photos of shipwrecks. The glass plate negatives are now in possession of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, who are restoring these partly historical documents of transport, trade and financial networks that have gone, now replaced by shipping container and plane.
Or, I should say these networks, that track right back to Humphrey Gilbert, are still there, but the items that travel through them have been displaced by newer models.
Partly just amazing images of ships, water, a persistence of images of wooden and rope structures at the moment they are dissolving, being wrecked.
MC
This relationship between image, surface and liquid comes to a head in the glass plate process. The rush to make the photograph before the ship sinks; glass plate photographs require exposure and developing with the emulsion still wet. There is a mirroring of soluble substance and time. These contingencies are locked together. I think it’s also interesting to note that the glass plate images are negatives masquerading as positives. They are like opposites to Mike Light’s images—his have no wrecks and are made into negatives, the Gibson’s have wrecks and appear to be positives.
There is something enduring about the image of a ship that is mid-sinking, the way the surrounding sea, or land, is dwarfed. These photographs, particularly the glass plates with their unique on-the-scene formation of the image, capture the last breaths of these ships.
MM
I like this.
MM
At the end of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851), all the boats are wrecked. But out of the whirlpool pops up a life-saving craft: Queequeg’s coffin that our narrator can cling onto. Like a surfboard.
MC
And there are sharks, circling!
Queequeg’s coffin is of course a wooden box, which you can connect to the analogue camera and the invisible making of a photograph in Photo, Phyto… But it also makes a sustained appearance in your first book Sharks, Death and Surfing, in which the carvings that Queequeg transcribes onto wood, in replica of his own skin.
I wonder how the same object connects the two books, and how it changes or moves between them.
MM
I’m always thinking about Moby Dick. This chapter, 110, ‘Queequeg in his Coffin’, always prompts more to think about.
In 2021 I wrote a short essay called ‘Epidermal Epistemology aboard the Pequod’[3], which is about skin, reading, tatts… this idea of the tattoo kicks off Photo, Phyto… I like tattoos, I think they are funny, and sexy, but maybe not in the way that they are intended to be.
Just now thinking about your question about my interest in the coffin, I notice a parallel: the carved box within the book itself serves several purposes around ships, containment, marking, death—its role shifts. And my interest in Queequeg and his coffin likewise moves on, from one manifestation or appearance to the next, always bobbing along.
MC
The coffins float from the depths, from a whirlpool, which itself contains everything, all things spinning. You bring up Tintin again, the image of the coffins floating to the surface. I’m curious about your references to Hergé. I had briefly wondered whether you would pick the shipwreck of the Unicorn as a favourite.
MM
I did think about a Tintin shipwreck, but the vehicle that really came to mind was not exactly a shipwreck, more a progression. It’s in The Crab with the Golden Claws, where Tintin, Snowy and Haddock escape. It shows, a little like Queequeg’s coffin, a replaceability or interchangeability between uses, containers, vehicles. The ship that they’re in is suddenly the longboat, is the plane towards death. And it points towards something else I love about the shipwreck: that it’s of course the historical pre-cursor to the car crash, which has such practical destructive force, and such cultural importance, to us now.
MC
Which is interesting because you explore the car crash in your first book and equate it to the shark; both sleek and finned.
There is a concept called vortextural thinking which I think is relevant to the specific emergence of the coffin from the wrecking of the Parsee. In this structure everything is moving constantly and held in relation to one another. It’s interesting to me to see the parallels between Poe’s maelstrom and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Melville’s Moby Dick. What is it about these writers, and their interchangeability? I wonder how the whirlpool that ends the book you have dwelt on for so long fits into things, what place it holds. In some ways it consumes the plot, consumes the book itself, everything is lost, but for our narrator and his trusty coffin-surfboard.
MM
The whirlpool sucks me back to The Odyssey, which was definitely in the running for a place in this list. Violence, domesticity, sea travel, complex involuted story-telling, porosity between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Lots of wreckage.
MM
Might be cheating, but instead of a JMW Turner painting of an actual shipwreck, I wanted to use one of his from the Whaler Sketchbooks, 1844-45.
They’re about burning the blubber, sunset at sea etc, but seem to point to the whole of drawing just at the point of breaking apart! And they remind me of Raymond Pettibon, surf artist, his late works in his recent Point Break book, an image called ‘Cloud Break’, where the whole representational scheme, which he repeats so insistently through many years, falls into constituent parts.
MC
More sea monsters. The colour, this orange recurs, it’s in Mike Light’s image of the Bikini Atoll test. Is it the sun or the burning blubber, the first sun or the second of the nuclear explosion.
MM
Good point.
MC
The sea monsters are obscure, difficult to see, perhaps not there at all.
I think sketchbooks, especially watercolour sketchbooks, have a quality to them that is like skin. The way the paper has to soak up and resist the water and the battering of the paint being pushed around and exposed to the elements, the pocket, and time. These pages remind me of your writing about tattoos and a puncturing of surface, though there is no puncturing in watercolour, only soaking in. The paper and the paint sort of float together. As you say, just at the point of breaking apart.
MM
Yes, that’s nice about what sits on the surface and what sinks in. Like when sand under the incoming wave gets wet but the wave recedes and the moisture sinks down, so the sand dries itself as you look. With puncturing, I did a short film about this in 2022 with Jess Nicholson, called Dusky or Grey[5], about the slippage between marks on the surface, and things stuck under the skin, and things which escape.
It’s interesting you mention Raymond Pettibon, I looked for ‘Cloud Break’ and in my search came across a series of drawings he made of mushroom clouds.
As for the category as a whole I’ve been thinking about the linkage through depth that the shipwreck provides; the ship in its surface dwelling which acts rather like the surfboard at times carving through waves, floating, contingent upon the surface of the volume of water.
MM
There’s a feature in a recent issue (31.4) of The Surfer’s Journal (which I highly recommend), about board shaper Rusty Preisendorfer, including the commendation that:
‘He realised that boats are powered through the water and surfboards are powered by the water. I think a lot of shapers at the time [the 1970s] were just thinking of surfboards as small boats. He realised that they weren’t, that they were something different.’
I mention this because I like the recognition that you need concentration and depth of knowledge to make something really good. I know that I often merge categories, or glide between or elide them when it suits me. But I think it’s also really important to do as you’re doing here, Marguerite, and dig deeply into the definitions, and be closely aware of what properly, technically constitutes the category. To try to think rigorously about what it is you’re thinking about. Otherwise one can fall into the bad habit of being that arts person who just says, oh wow quantum theory, without doing your utmost to understand the actual structures and mechanisms of what you’re talking about. This brings me back to Melville again, who, because he’s a deeply strange writer, doesn’t just suggest that, oh, life is a bit like a boat. He talks you through every component part of the ship, from binnacle deviation to emotional turmoil to gallant cross-trees, explaining how it actually fits together.
***
Marguerite bio here:
Melissa bio here:
***
[2] www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/109FSG#full-artwork-details
[3] theyellowpaper.org.uk/edition/edition-2/
[4] www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/the-whalers-sketchbook-65973
[5] sharksillustrated.org/2022/11/29/dusky-or-grey/
[6] www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/the-whalers-sketchbook-65973
