They love the sea, they love their mates, they love their girlfriends and wives, and for a few hours they also love the women they meet in ports around the world. They are sailors, and one of them, an American boy with a sparkling uniform and a sincere smile, wrote “Love you always” on his portrait. A promise of eternal love that allows us to reconstruct, through a hundred anonymous European and American photographs from 1860 to 1960, one of the most legendary and fascinating male figures. The only one since Ulysses to have conquered men and women, passing through the greats of literature and cinema. The only one to have crossed not only every ocean, but also that particular ocean of images and imaginations created by photography.
No one, in fact, has asked photography for what only photography could guarantee more than sailors, namely that on those few centimetres of paper, love and friendship, adventure and home, the place to return to, could withstand the frightening and nameless immensity of the sea. This is why the sentimental journey into the ocean of sailors is above all a journey into the ocean of photography. Two centuries ago, in 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph by exposing a sheet of pewter covered with Judea bitumen for eight hours.
Today, we have reached the figure of two trillion images taken in a year. Faced with this ocean of pixels, will we, the brave captains of the digital age, be able to preserve something of our lives? What will become of our declarations of eternal love?
