Along the Arthur Kill on Staten Island, abandoned ferries, military vessels, fireboats and other ships settle slowly into the mud at a marine salvage yard sometimes described as an accidental maritime museum. Among the vessels associated with the site are ships connected to the racial integration of the U.S. Navy and to the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. Together, the wrecks preserve fragments of military, industrial and maritime history that might otherwise have disappeared.

I have photographed abandoned ships as part of the same impulse that draws me to abandoned buildings: they retain evidence of the people and systems that once used them. At the Staten Island boat graveyard, research into individual vessels turned what first appears to be a landscape of rusting hulks into fragments of military, racial and maritime history.