Tuesday 14 May 2013

We Like Both Of These Photographs,

because they are almost opposite of each other,


the first is of the SS Ayrfield, also known as “The Floating Forest” in Sydney’s Homebush Bay, near the Olympic village, I guess you could call it an oasis but in reverse of the normal one for here the land is surrounded by water, the SS Ayrfield (originally launched as SS Corrimal), was a collier ship built in England in 1911 and used by the Commonwealth Government during World War II to transport supplies to American troops in the Pacific,


it was sold in 1950 and operated as a collier on the sixty-miler run between Newcastle and Sydney, until 1972 when the ship’s registration was cancelled and it was sent to its final resting place, Homebush Bay, where mango trees and other vegetation took the rusting hulk over making it a floating oasis,

unlike this one which I suppose you could call a true oasis, located approximately 6 km (3.73 miles) from the outskirts of the city of Dunhuang in Western China, lies Crescent Lake, an incredible oasis in the Gobi desert. Known as Yueyaquan in Chinese, the lake has been shrinking since the 1970s and is now about a third of its original size, n the last three decades alone, the lake has dropped more than 25 feet. However, it has been reported that the government has recently taken steps to preserve the site and restore the depth of the lake to previous levels, both photographs unique in their own right, both similar but almost a black-and-white negative of each other, water surrounded by land, land surrounded by water.

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