Beyond the Sea
In March 2018, João Canziani boarded the Queen Mary 2 from Hong Kong to Singapore to shoot a magazine story about the ship. The feature never made it to print, but the photographs—taken on board and at stops along the way—linger. In this photo essay, he shares his expressionistic images from that experience: color studies, character studies, and atmospheric explorations.
“Five years is not that long in the grand scheme of things, but after moving from New York to Los Angeles, going through a pandemic, and living in a tricky economy, these pictures feel like an eternity ago,” João observes. "They belong to another era, a more innocent time. My visit to Hong Kong was before the protests, and before China completely tightened its grip on the city and its citizens.”
He spent a couple of days in Hong Kong, then sailed on the Queen Mary 2, stopping in Vietnam, and ending up in Singapore. “It was so liberating to capture vignettes of Hong Kong… I walked without aim, lured by the colors, the lights, the people. On our stop in Vietnam, I took a tender to Nha Trang and wandered for a few hours. It definitely wasn’t enough time, just scratching the surface of this rich culture. I fantasized, ‘What if I just didn’t go back to the big boat?’”
The cruise-ship passengers were a story in themselves. “It was crazy to me how some of them remained aboard for months, even years,” says João. “This was their moveable home, with just the setting changing as the ship navigated the world. They could have a quick dose of a different cultures if they so chose by heading to land for a few hours on a stop, knowing that at the end of the day they’d be back in the safety of this enormous metal can, wearing a tuxedo for the 8 o’clock captain’s dinner.”
