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Biography - Shaun O'Boyle |
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The year I graduated from high school I moved to New Orleans and found a job working at the Avondale Shipyard just outside of New Orleans on the Mississippi River. I was hired as a laborer working the 12 hour graveyard shift, 6pm to 6am. I almost lost one of my fingers the first night on the job. I was operating an air powered winch, hauling buckets full of scrap metal from the bowels of the ship up onto the top deck where I was standing. I could look between my feet thru the access hole in the deck and see the guys loading the scrap into my bucket 80 feet below in the bottom of the ship. Hauling up a bucket full of many hundred pounds of scrap metal, I was letting the wire cable run thru my leather gloved hand when suddenly my glove caught a frayed piece of cable and instantly pulled my hand and glove up into the pulley, wedging my glove between the cable and pulley. It just missed the end of my fingers in the pulley, if my glove hadn't pulled off a little I would be minus one finger now. That should have been an indication to move on and find work in a healthier environ, but I was desperate for the cash and the job paid pretty well. I worked on one of the two dry docks they had at the yard, it was an 81,000 ton dry dock. The work was occasionally interesting, in order to float a ship on the dry dock we would set up blocks on the empty dock in the shape of the hull of the ship, then we would sink the dock into the muddy Mississippi waters, move the ship into an exact position over the blocks with winches and cables (my enemy) and then float the whole dock with massive ship aboard up out of the river; a boat upon a larger boat. These were really large ships, your typical cargo ships and oil tankers. When on the dry dock these ships would look like some strange massive stranded whale caught on the beach at low tide. Most of the time this job was labor intensive, dirty and, as the clock slowly ticked toward 4, 5 and 6 am, exhausting. We would usually be in the bowels of the ship doing one nasty job or another, pumping silt and sludge out of the bilge areas or washing down the cargo holds with high pressure hoses. If it was an oil tanker we would be pumping what was left of the crude oil out of the tanks before repairs were done. Perhaps the worst job was going into the confined spaces of the ship where the welders were working, we would clean up the scrap metal, smoke would be heavy in the air and seeing and breathing was a real discomfort, even with respirators. I lasted at this job for about 4 months. I found work in New Orleans doing something a bit more familiar, putting in swimming pools, something I had done for years during the summers in my father business during high school. But the Avondale job taught me several lessons, that to get ahead I needed to get in gear and get myself a better education or face the fact that I would most probably be doing that kind of work for the rest of my life. And secondly it sparked a real interest in large industrial operations and big machinery. Something that interests me to to this day as you can see if you view my industrial ruins photography on this website. I was always struck by the beauty of those massive ships out of water, and I would occasionally sneak my instamatic camera into work and grab a few snaps when the light was just right at sunset. It's safe to say that the beginning of my interest in industrial photography was right there at the Avondale shipyard. After leaving the shipyard job I began to get an interest in travel, the idea of going to Europe intrigued me so I saved my money and hopped on a standby flight to Brussels in the fall of 1979. It was cold and raining in Brussels so I hopped on a train for Paris and then on to Barcelona where I saw the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. I was smitten by the beautiful organic forms and shapes of his buildings, parks and cathedral. I traveled to Rome where I met up with a canadian fellow and together we decided to go to Africa. We made our way to Athens where we caught a flight to Cairo. Here was my first experience with culture shock. We arrived in Cairo at night and took a taxi into town from the airport, the cab driver was trying to sell us one expensive hotel after another, we refused being on a shoestring budget, he got mad and just dropped us off at a corner in the city. Its night in Cairo, a massive city and a complete unknown to both of us, so we just start walking. The streets are dirt, the buildings are in very poor condition and people are just stopping in their tracks and staring at us. I was scared, if you were in a neighborhood like this at night in a large city in the US you were dead meat. But we soon found the people to be very friendly and just curious, soon we had a large escort of dozens of people leading and following us down the street, we told them that we were looking for a hotel to sleep at, so the crowd shifted directions and within 15 minutes we were at a small reasonably clean and cheap hotel. I was surprised at the friendliness of the people and at my confusion of what in New York would be symbols of danger and caution in fact in many ways did not apply in Egypt. Egypt is a different culture and life is lived in a very different way. Our travels in North Africa took us down the Nile through all of Egypt, across Lake Nassar as far south as Wadi Halfa, a dusty wind blown town in the desert, then onto Khartoum Sudan, via a very slow train across the Sahara desert. I returned from this trip with a completely changed perspective on the world. Travel was now in my blood and no matter what I did I had the want to be on the road seeing new and different places and cultures. And as you can see from my travel photographs on this site that travel bug is still with me. But more travel would have to wait. I had decided that on returning from Africa that it was time to get on with school in a serious way so I started attending the local Community College. I took liberal arts classes as well as a photography class and visual arts classes and I had in hand my new yashica 35mm camera. I decided that with my interest in architecture and my many years of construction experience from working with my father, who is a carpenter by trade, that I would attempt to get into an architecture school. I was accepted at Parsons School of Design and started school there in the fall of 1982. I studied Architectural and Industrial Design at Parsons. It was a tough and rigorous course load but rewarding and of course it hugely impacted my life. During the years in NYC I lived in many places around the city, from Hoboken I moved to the lower east side, little Italy and finally settled on Staten Island where rents are cheaper and the people nice. While living on Staten Island I photographed the Hospital X site. After graduating from Parsons in 1987 I again saved my cash working the summer in the pool business and set off on a trip through Central America and then on to Asia, first visiting Mexico, Belize and Guatemala with my then girl friend and now wife Wendy, then traveling on to Thailand, then Burma and up to Nepal, through Tibet and into China and down to Hong Kong. I spent six month on the road on that trip, the highlight definitely being the Trek to Mt. Everest base camp in Nepal. I had my trusty Yashica and Rollei cameras with me and took many photographs of this trip, many of which you can see on this site. Upon returning from this winter of travel I returned to New York and went to work for one of my former teachers from Parsons. I worked on many interesting projects during my time there. Probably the most interesting was a complete survey of the Museum of Natural History in New York. Our job was to measure and verify the square footage of every department in the museum, this meant going into every room in the museum and taking dimensions, and correcting the floor plan with any changes. Only a small percentage of the floor space of the museum is actually public accessible, the rest is laboratories and storage for the incredible artifacts and specimens the museum holds. I was awe struck at what we saw in the back rooms, from the ichthyology department to the entomology department and everything in between there are scientists and field workers hauling in artifact and specimens from digs, rainforests, ocean bottoms and frozen icecaps around the world. During this time I was also photographing the Boatyard, a project that required spending most weekends that winter in the Boatyard or in the darkroom processing the film and making prints. |
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When I get time I will bring this biography up to date, after all it is a work in progress... |