BOOK:Stefano Benazzo-Wrecks,SKIRA Editore
Stefano Benazzo, photographer, sculptor and model ship maker, presents his passion for wreckages in the book “Wrecks” by SKIRA Editore. With 144 pages and 110 Illustrations the book documents and preserves shipwrecks around the world, bound to inevitable decline in the elements to which they are exposed. As the Stefano Benazzo says “I love and respect the wrecks: although apparently negative symbols, in their essentiality they allow us to discern an unexpected glimpse of serenity. For some, they express harshness, hopelessness, fatality, the end of the men and their dreams, suffering due to injuries, the struggle against the elements and surrender. For me, however, they assist the man lost in the dark forest to seek himself in the unexplored abyss that exists within each one of us. The wrecks bring out what is rich, passionate and varied in us, but also the layers of sediment that have been deposited and encrusted in our psychic ocean, like the rust that holds together their remains”. Benazzo’s images settle for future generations the features of ships that elements will destroy more and more. The distance makes it difficult to approach wrecks, and it is nearly impossible to transport them to museums. For example in Namibia, on the Skeleton Coast (named because even those who survive shipwreck and reach the shore will confront a desert and die) lies the Eduard Bohlen, buried in the African sand since 1909, a merchant steamship built by the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg in 1891. Lost, abandoned, covered in sand, beached, half-sunk, wedged, stuck, stranded, hauled onto dry land and trapped, the wrecks are there, ravaged by time, ready to tell their stories to people like Stefano Benazzo, who knows how to record and transmit them through his spectacular photographs. It is for us to strive to see them and hear them.-Dimitris Lempesis
