ISMAEL
“Why on your first voyage as a passenger did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration when you were told that neither your ship nor you were within sight of land? Why did the ancient Persians hold the sea sacred? Why did the Greeks bestow upon it a distinct deity and make of it Jove’s own brother? Surely all this is not without significance. Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper is the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who, unable to grasp the placid and troubling image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and drowned. But we see the same image in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the elusive phantom of life, and this is the key to everything.”
Excerpt from Moby Dick. Herman Melville
Through binoculars, I observe different places of the Atlantic Ocean its movement, its shapes, and its horizon. Ismael is a series of 135 photographs, one for each chapter of Moby Dick, the novel that inspires this work, which exposes the relationship between the ocean and the human being and the way we have to look at it and discover it.