Profiles

'At 4.30 or 5am there's enough light to see what's going on and not too many deep shadows,' says photographer Andrew Bell, sweeping his hand across an imposing image that looks at first glance like some immense, ancient temple. A tiny figure emerges from a door and another stands high above, looking down from the edge of the monumental structure. They seem to be part of some sort of mysterious tableau.

Stripped of everything that can be removed, a ship hulk gets cut up.

In fact the men are workers at one of the 60 ship breaking yards which spread along 30 or so kilometres of broad tidal mudflats north of Chittagong at Sitakunda. We're standing in the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour in Sydney where Bell's work is being shown in an exhibition called 'Steel Beach: Ship breaking in Bangladesh'. Bell, an Englishman and professional photographer now resident in Sydney, first came across an account of the Bangladeshi ship breakers while perusing Greenpeace's website in 2004. In the intervening years he's completed three photographic trips to the 'steel beach' at Sitakunda.

Ship breaking used to be the exclusive domain of specialist shipyards in the industrialised world. But in 1965, a devastating cyclone carried a ship up on to the shore at Sitakunda. The hulk stayed there for some years and then one day a local steel firm decided to cut it up for scrap. Enterprising local business men saw an opportunity - and an industry was born.

Forty years later, the yards along the muddy shoreline of Sitakunda employ tens of thousands. In this conservative Islamic country the workers are exclusively men. They come mainly from the deeply impoverished rural north of Bangladesh where a typical farmworker might earn the equivalent of 30 cents a day. According to Bell, even the most lowly paid 'lifter' can make around three times as much in the Dickensian world of the yards.

It is hard and extremely dangerous work. Safety measures are essentially non-existent. Few of the men wear any protective gear at all. Many work in their bare feet even as they use oxy-acetylene torches and hand tools to carve 20-tonne chunks of steel away from the apartment block-sized hulks.

To the casual observer, the pace of work in the yards is deceptively slow. 'The whole thing is about money,' explains Bell. 'They buy the big tankers for $US12-14 million and that's borrowed at about 10-12 percent. They have to pay that back as fast as they can to actually make some money from the whole exercise. So they're paying it back daily. They're cutting the ship up as fast as they can, selling it, getting the money into the bank and reducing the interest. It's a kind of a race. They work day and night.'


Night shift workers, happy at the end of their shift.

The ship breaking process begins with the vessel being run aground on the highest possible tide. 'They carry these big cables out and attach them to the ship,' says Bell, 'and then every high tide as the ship's getting lighter and lighter, and they're cutting bits off, they drag it closer in. Not because they're thinking about the workers, but just basically to be more productive. The closer it is to the yard, the less carrying there is and the quicker [the ship is broken up].'

Just as there are little in the way of work safety procedures, so too is scant regard paid to the pollution caused by cutting up vessels that for years have been carrying crude oil, coal - and far worse cargoes. In the old days, hulks like these were often simply scuttled at sea. Now the pollution is more visible, but, says Bell, 'Everything's recycled. Nothing's wasted. The wire, the light bulbs, tiles, fittings... Even the oil in the sump is taken out and used to fire bricks.'
 
'There's about 40,000 workers in the yards themselves, but then it's been estimated there's a couple of million that work in the cafes or reselling the stuff off the ships and recyling steel. There's a whole strip behind the beach where they sell tiles, toilets, sinks, etc,' Bell says. 'The ships supply 80 per cent of Bangladesh's steel. It's melted down just behind the beach and turned into reinforcement bars for building.'

After years of bad press, gaining access to the yards with a camera was not easy. 'Getting in was always a challenge. It varies day to day. You can go to one yard, they'll let you in, you think "ah great!" But you turn up the next morning to do some more shots and they don't want you in the place.' 

To keep from attracting too much attention to himself, Bell would carry his 9x7cm Fuji Landscape camera into the yards himself, but would have an assistant bring in his tripod a few minutes later. The tripod was essential because not only was he shooting in low light levels, but he invariably stopped his wide-angle lens down to very small aperture values in order to maximise the depth of field. As a consequence, his exposures often ran to 30 seconds or more. 

'An "action" shot would probably be 1/8th of a second,' says Bell. 'There's not a lot of action. When they're walking in that mud, they're not going too quickly. That's why I use the wide angle lens and why I shot them generally stopped all the way down, because that's how you see it, you see things in wide angle. And [it's] sharp from your feet to the horizon. It means you've got to do a lot more walking, because with a wide lens you've obviously got to go right up to everything.'

For the Bangladesh series, Bell often set his camera up with the rising sun at his back, and therefore with a perspective that looked west toward the Bay of Bengal. 'I shot that way because I like the openness of the horizon with nothing on it. It makes the ship look more dynamic and in the morning, that's the way the light worked best. You've just got a sky and a beach. You've got nothing else to distract. It gives the image a real dynamic.' 


Dawn on the Sitakunda mud flats.

The slow pace of the work, the low light levels, the small apertures and therefore the very long exposures, gives a new twist to the meaning of Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment'. Gesturing toward one of the images he'd taken in the rain, Bell says 'that could have been taken the moment before or the minute after, it doesn't really matter because it's a case of being there when that light is right. I would have had an hour to do that shot, not the Cartier-Bresson fraction of a second!'

'[When it's raining] the air's almost got a density to it, it's slightly silvery. I love this shot,' he says pointing to one image. 'To me it's like an apartment block, there are people doing different things in these different quarters, and so there's a kind of narrative to the image. It's almost like a two-minute documentary.'

Bell reinforces the overwhelming scale of his subjects by printing his work at near poster size. The astonishing level of detail, the subtle gradation of values and the tremendous colour gamut are something he says can only be obtained with medium or large format film. 'You can print a metre wide and not see the grain', he says of his 9x7 Fuji Velvia transparencies. 'I've not seen a digital camera that can do that.' But using film also entails a fair amount of stress. He estimates that for a single expedition to Bangladesh, his film investment alone could run to $3000. With three or four trips through dodgy x-ray machines on the way there and back, the journey home and the wait for the all-clear call from the lab was inevitably a nail-biting business.

Important as the size of the prints are, and gritty as the subject matter is, it is not his intention to engage in a polemic. The thread in the narrative that most interests him is the one about the dignity and ordinary humanity of the men who earn their livings breaking up ships by hand. He conveys the scale and sheer immensity of the vessels not only by using his wide-angle lens and close-up perspective, but by always including at least a few of the workers in his photographs. His portraits have something in common with the austere compositional approach of an August Sander. There is a simplicity and directness to them that conveys a respectful regard for the men themselves.

'In a lot of this I see a kind of hope in a human struggle to survive,' says Bell. 'The struggle to survive in Bangladesh is a real battle and these people will do such things to feed a family, put their kids into school or even put a roof over their head. They'd be doing something, they'd be cutting up a ship, they'd see me there in the background and they'd stop, look up and smile at me. So I'd photograph them smiling. I didn't feel the need to show them sweating under a 20 tonne bit of steel just to add a false drama.

'I see that as a kind of great affirmation of life and love. The real bad news is that there's nothing better for them. There isn't an alternative. There's no better place where they can go and get a decent job,' he added.


Andrew Bell began his commercial photographic career in London over 30 years ago. He now lives in Sydney where he has most recently devoted himself to documentary projects that not only have focused on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, but on such diverse subjects as the abandoned towns and farms of Chernobyl and the practitioners of Swenka in Soweto, South Africa.
His website is www.andrewbell.net.au.


See Photo Review magazine Issue 36 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

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