Laurent Maes won't say how he gets his crystal-clear photos of ships at sea, but their impressive resolution allows them to be printed at sizes up to 10 feet across (unless you own a print you'll have to settle for the fullscreen button in the above gallery). Not only that, but at that fidelity viewers can practically read over the shoulder of yacht-goers.
The only detail Laurent will reveal is that he's never met anyone on any of the ships. He hasn't told his gallery representation how Shipshape's hi-res effects were achieved, and not even being a paying customer will buy you the secret.
"Some collectors have pieces, and they don't know how I'm doing it," says Maes.
Why all the secrecy? As an architect as well as a photographer, he compares his approach to architectural aims--like achieving a strikingly thin roof. The result is achieved through several techniques in combination. "There's not just one invention" behind his photos, he says, and he'd like to be the one to capitalize on them. He doesn't expect imitators any time soon.
Maes, who grew up in Belgium, divides his time between Brussells and Porto--finding that the latter offered a better backdrop for these seagoing vessels. "I've tried some pictures in the north of Europe, but the water was brown or gray," Maes says. Over the course of the project, begun in 2012 and slated for completion later this year, Maes found that the southern Mediterranean provided a more pleasing palette.
The ships in the photos are all roughly 100 meters long and sail over a sea that hour by hour shifts subtly between blues and greens. "It's a choice," Maes says, with the goal being to "find harmony between the color of the ship and the color of the sea." In all of his photography, Maes starts with a concept of the final image, and then works backward to achieve the shot.
The series offers what he describes as a "second level of reading." That is, the ability to see down to the upholstery of the deck chairs on the yacht. Which brings up the issue of voyeurism and privacy, but people were never the point of the project. Maes acknowledges that for some, there's interest in imagining the lives of the seafarers, but says that for him the series was a graphic work from the start. To keep the emphasis on the "symmetry and pure lines" of the vessels, he assigned ships numbers rather than descriptive titles. "I wanted to put put all the ships at the same level," he says.
