Maritimus Oriental is a still life series photographed inside the Nha Trang Oceanographic Museum in Vietnam, focusing on preserved marine specimens collected and catalogued from the 1930s through to the late 1970s — much of it during the years of the Vietnam War.

What drew me to the collection was not only the biological forms themselves, but the atmosphere surrounding them: dust-covered jars, fading labels, clouded glass, and the strange tension between scientific preservation and slow decay.

Photographed entirely in available light, the specimens gradually transformed before the camera into something beyond documentation — suspended forms caught somewhere between marine biology, and sculpture.

As William Beebe once wrote:

“When the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”
— William Beebe

MARITIMUS ORIENTAL
Nha Trang, Vietnam 2013
Archival Pigment Print
Edition of 5

(see entire series in the back catalogue)