The shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh, offer a mystical allurethat is incongruous. This is a nasty, dark, and soulless place. Ostensibly, it offers nothing but an elemental canvas on which to frame extremes. But the haunting rawness of the factory beaches is spectacular.
I had two goals on this assignment and one wish. The first goal was tooffer a sense of scale; the second was to capture a sense of this industrial place. My wish was for the cloud cover to be stormy. A sky that suggested impending trouble seemed more appropriate than picture-postcard blue.
The road inland from the yards has heavy security, and my preconception that bribery could work was misplaced. The only alternative was to land ashore quietly by fishing boat and then approach the factories by foot. This is a dangerous route that few photographers have chosen. The tides are fast, the beaches are sinking mud, and the workers on top of the vast tankers 500 feet above the sea will throw pipes and debris if you invade their space.
The day this was taken, I left my room at 4:30 a.m. The security detail was light; it was too early for anyone to worry about photographers landing by sea. The mud was horrendous and very unnerving, but the result is a big moment. Antz has a poetic evocation of size and scale, and the onshore detail of workers coalesces with the mighty tanker to offer that true sense of place I was looking to capture. The gathering storm was a fortunate detail, as was the accompanying early morning shaft of light. But it is the worker detail that lifts this image—the seemingly senior figure at the back enjoying an early morning smoke as the other three walk toward him.
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