Prof’s photos featured in National Geographic

Priscilla Smith, associate professor of fine arts and visual communications

6:37 p.m., Sept. 29, 2004--“The wind was howling ... like demons of the sea,” wrote William Nichols, one of the survivors of the .S. Republic, a Civil War steamship that sank in a hurricane 139 years ago.

The story of the steamship, its survivors and how they stayed alive in the fearsome sea, its million dollar treasures and its discovery is recounted in the September issue of National Geographic magazine, with photos by Priscilla Smith, associate professor of fine arts and visual communications at UD.

It was 1865 and the ship was on its way from Manhattan to New Orleans loaded with passengers, cargo and $400,000 worth of gold and silver coins “to help jump-start the South’s economy.” A day after passing Cape Hatteras, the ship ran into a hurricane described by its captain as “the perfect hurricane.” It went down about 100 miles southeast of Savannah, off the coast of Florida.

For almost a century and a half, the ship and its cargo lay undiscovered 1,700 feet under the sea until September 2003, when Odyssey Exploration Marine, a salvage company, found the S.S. Republic.

For the magazine’s article, Smith was hired on the shoot to assist National Geographic photographer Jonathan Blair, who spoke on the UD campus last spring. Blair did the breathtaking underwater photography. He asked Smith to shoot the salvaged artifacts.

“It presented lots of challenges,” Smith said.

To begin with, the multimillion-dollar salvage was scattered in and around Florida, stored in decay-proof containers and under guard 24 hours a day.

“I had to fabricate the sets around the objects at each site,” Smith said. She was not allowed to touch many of the bottles she shot, and the ship’s bell was in a 60-gallon jug of seawater, stored in a locked self-storage facility where the lights went out every half hour.

The coins, valued at $75 million to collectors or numismatists, were stored in a numismatist facility behind several locked doors and were never out of sight of a guard. She had to be taught techniques for handling the coins and construct a lighting format that would show the patina and as much detail as possible. “I created a set and had it ready, but when we got there, it needed some fine tuning,” Smith said.

“We were given an afternoon to photograph the coins. About three-quarters of the way through, there was an acid leak in one of the rooms, and they started evacuating the facility. We could hear people yelling and running around,” Smith said. “By the time they came for us, we were finished. They were wearing protective masks, and we had to cover our faces as we were lead out.”

Photographing the bell proved almost as harrowing.

Each moment the bell is out of seawater, it is decomposing, so, it could only be exposed for a total of 15 minutes and then had to be sprayed continually. Because of the time constraint, Smith had to construct the set and lighting in the storage facility using a dummy or stand-in approximately the size and depth of the bell.

“It took one hour to set it up and do test shots, and then, they brought in the talent,” she said. In the photo, the bell glows from behind a strip of light accenting the turquoise and green corrosion encircling the copper bell. “I was actually lighting the front of the bell with a flashlight.”

Initially, Smith wasn’t hired to photograph the bottles. That was the domain of marine archeologist, Neil Cunningham Dobson, but he wasn’t having much success, so Smith was asked to consult. She set up and shot one of the bottles as a demonstration and when Dobson looked at the digital photo, he exclaimed, “Thaaaat’s sexy,” and Smith got the job.

Still, the bottle shoot wasn’t easy either. Smith wasn’t allowed to touch the bottles—only an archeologist could do that—and she had to create the perfect backdrop and lighting for bottles that were stored on the salvage ship.

In fact, the only artifact that she was able to shoot more familiar surroundings—her studio at UD—was the locket survivor William Nichols held on to throughout the entire ordeal. It had belonged to his daughter, May, before she died of typhoid fever. In it was a photo of his wife, Thyrza.

“I’m richer in experience,” Smith said. “It was challenging and fun. I had to use all the techniques I teach my students, like working on your feet, fast thinking when you’re shooting and fast problem solving.”

Article by Barbara Garrison
Photo by Duane Perry

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