Gil Mares photographs the rusted and vividly colored hulls of mighty ships
“The Company Men,” which opens in movie theaters on Dec. 10, was filmed in Boston and takes place in part at a global shipping firm. The film, starring Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kevin Costner, “centers on a year in the life of three men trying to survive a round of corporate downsizing at a major company.” What’s particularly noteworthy, however, is that some of the pictures that we’ll see on the walls behind the actors were taken by a local photographer, Gil Mares. This Saturday night, Mares will be showing his work – especially those pieces selected by the filmmakers – at a one-night-only exhibition in Beverly Hills.
The photographs are of ships, but you’ve probably never seen ships depicted quite like this.
The images came to the attention of the movie people in a roundabout way. For five and a half years, Mares used to exhibit at a Boston gallery on Newbury Street. Then the gallery closed. A couple of months later, another gallery, two doors down, called Mares’ old gallery because they wanted to contact him: some people were interested in his work for their film. Eventually, Mares says, “they made nine six-foot by four-foot photographs.”
In the details
The focus wasn’t always on ships, the way it pretty much is now.
“In the early ‘70s, when I started,” Mares says, “I was usually shooting people, a lot of relatives in Mexico. I was doing mostly black and white, printing my own and developing. In 1980, when I moved to Tucson, I started doing architectural details of adobe structures in the Southwest and Spanish colonial structures in Latin America, mostly Mexico, and then moving on to Ecuador and Peru.
“But in December of 1999,” he continues, “I ended up shooting the ship hulls, entirely as a fluke.”
He’d gone to a harbor to take photographs and, not being able to get as close as he wanted, an acquaintance (presumably not Charon) offered to row him to his destination. “I went past these ships,” he recalls, “and the ships were maybe 40-50 feet tall and three- or four-hundred feet long, and they were nothing but rust and color and gouges and forms, and the light bulb went off in my head and I thought, ‘oh my god, I could shoot this; I have two or three cameras, a bunch of lenses, a ton of film,’ and I just started shooting the ship hulls and composing what I saw, trying to juxtapose the forms and find things that are interesting.”
Even at that early point you saw the art in it? You saw these as abstract paintings in a way, right?
“Mostly; because the colors were so intense,” Mares says. “That’s something that I think most of us never really imagine with ship hulls. It’s such wild colors. Some of these ship hulls look lipstick pink or mint green or absolute purple. When you’re up next to them you can really get a feel for that color, especially with the enormity of the ship hulls.”
The color of the hull also saturates the water in between the ship and the boat in which Mares is sitting or standing.
In composing his pictures, he says, “I try and bring in a reflection from the water with the ship hull because it gives it another dimension, a little more depth, and it involves that interplay between the hull of the ship and the reflection of the hull of the ship in the water. So it’s the form, it’s the texture, it’s the color; and it’s the deformed markings on the ship, or the little holes on the ship deformed in the water, that gives it more depth and more of an artistic feel.”
That sense of depth that the alert viewer quickly pinpoints is an essential component of one’s appreciation of Mares’ work, but the range of colors that he can capture and preserve is even more astonishing.
“For the last 13 years,” Mares says, “I’ve been using what I believe is one of the best printers in the country, Weldon Color Lab, in Culver City. When I started shooting the ship hulls we were using Ilfochrome, and now we’ve gone from Ilfochrome to Fujiflex, and these are basically plastic materials, not wood-based paper, that allow for a very sharp image and very intense colors.
“I think it’s important to state that the majority of my photographs that are on display, more than 90 percent of them, are transparencies. They’re based on slides, they’re not digital images at all. And there’s no digital manipulation of anything because these were slides that were placed in an enlarger and printed on the material, so there’s no digital process there.
“Now, the last couple of years I have made the move to digital photography, and I’m trying to keep the photographs looking more like a traditional print. In other words, we’re not going in there and changing the color and adding things. This isn’t graphic arts; the process still is about taking absolute reality, composing it, and having it behave differently when it’s on a wall. It’s not about starting with an image and then adding other things – either color or objects or forms.”
Nautical miles
In the ten-plus years you’ve been shooting ships, has anything changed in your approach to them?
“I don’t think that anything has changed from when I first started,” Mares replies. “I’m still just trying to compose an image that’s balanced and that has a juxtaposition of forms, that has some depth, and has some interest. Even though all these photographs are color photographs, the primary concern is the composition. If the composition works, if it’s balanced, if it makes the viewer want to stand in front of the image and look at it, then the details will come to the people who are looking at the photographs.
“I’m still just trying to get a balanced composition, that’s what it’s all about,” he continues. “The forms, the colors, all that is secondary. I shoot a lot of photographs, and I use just a handful. And that’s the process; that’s what makes it work.”
Are you pleased with the response from viewers?
“I’m always happy with the response that I get, usually when I have a new show in a different gallery. As people walk in, and they look at it, their first thought is, What the hell is this? It’s great to see the people when they first come in, because they’ll look at one photograph after another and you can see – as they look at maybe two or three or four – if they understand what it is, because they see the water and they realize after a while that it’s a ship just sitting in the water. It’s not a ruse, I’m not hiding what it is; it’s just that the compositions are such that it’s not actually known what they are when you first look at them.”
Mares, who primarily photographs in the harbors at Long Beach, is in the enviable position of having his subjects come to him. They do the traveling, so he doesn’t have to.
Has there been an instance in which you’ve shot the same ship, years apart?
“The same ships come back and forth, the tankers, the cargo ships,” Mares says. “I’ve seen the same ships numerous times. You see that the sides of the ships have changed from a year or two or three before. The paint fades, there’s more rust, there’s more gouges and markings on the ship, so the ships evolve.”
This gives his work yet another dimension, doesn’t it? As Paulo Coelho once remarked, “The ship is safest when it’s in port, but that’s not what ships were built for.” In the end, of course, no matter how many times it’s done in dry dock, it’s the sea that puts the final coat of paint on all ships.
Although he has, on occasion, photographed fishing boats and other smaller craft, Mares affirms that, “for the most part, I really do like that feel of the big iron, the big steel of the ship hulls with the rust, and the enormity of the size. Being able to capture an image in front of these monstrous cargo ships, that make them appear delicate and tenuous and transparent sometimes, is really that sense that I like to convey because, again, it’s not through trickery, it’s just through composition of the image and trying to find the interesting elements in the composition.”
In for the long haul
So, will you be staying with ships for a while longer?
“Yeah. I will shoot ships for the rest of my life,” Mares replies with a laugh. But he also has other ideas in mind, including taking portraits of people, which he says he hasn’t done in quite some time. “I want to start capturing some essence from people I feel inspired to shoot. It’s nice having these different projects coming along because it keeps the interest alive in the camera. The camera is a vehicle by which you can communicate your art, a vehicle in which you show other people how you see the world. That’s the great thing about the camera.”
Let’s skip back a few years to when you first picked up the camera. Tell me how you got started, and what your sensibilities were towards photography and art.
“I’ve always been interested in art,” Mares says. “I never really had any formal training in art, but from 1970, with my first fulltime job, I started buying art books. I have a very large collection of art books; and I would sit down and I would go through every page and look at every image. I did this for years and years, and I think I just internalized a sense of composition. At the same time I started doing this I ended up getting a camera. I always wanted to do something serious with the camera, and I never really knew what to do or how to do it.”
A lot needs to be said for passion, and persistence.
“The other thing with the camera was that I wanted to try and get past the superficial image and convey some essence of the subject, to try and shoot so much that you can peel back the layers and show, again, some essence of whatever the subject was. That is what art is for me, the communication of some emotion or some feeling or some idea through a two-dimensional image, and having that communicated to a viewer, without any words. I’ve experienced that with friends who paint. Sometimes abstract ideas get communicated, just by an image, just by a painting. And that is, I think, the ultimate in art when you can communicate something to a viewer without any words.”
In the future, Mares would like his art to be shown around the world, and he points out that he’s had some success with his images being displayed in Europe. Early next year he’ll be shown locally at PS Zask Gallery in Rancho Palos Verdes, and he’s also looking to have an exhibition in Panama, by the Panama Canal – a fitting location if there is one.
“After 40 years of shooting,” he says, “I think I’m ready to devote myself fulltime to this enterprise.”
Gil Mares shows his work this Saturday from 7 to 10 p.m. in the David W. Streets Gallery, 9407 S. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. Photographs featured in the film “The Company Men” will be showcased, along with pieces from the larger collection. Reservations required at rsvp@faraciart.com. To find out more, call (424) 603-4970 or go to info@faraciart.com. ER
