Military ships from around the country converged on New York City on Wednesday for the start of Fleet Week, an annual celebration of seafaring service members since 1984.
As part of a Marine Corps initiative to diversify its social media reach, four photographers active on Instagram were allowed to experience the voyage to New York aboard the USS Bataan (LHD-5), an amphibious assault ship outfitted for 3,200 Marines and sailors. Over three days, as it traveled from the Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia to Manhattan, Anthony B. Geathers, Pablo Unzueta, Balazs Gardi, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind observed target practices, landing exercises, and everyday scenes of life at sea, sharing images and stories of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit with tens of thousands of followers along the way.
The photographers were selected to join the trip for their variety of backgrounds and photographic approaches. Geathers, a photographer from Brooklyn, is a veteran who served as a machine gunner with 1st Battalion, 6th Marines from 2009 to 2012. Gardi and Taylor-Lind had both embedded with military previously in their documentary and photojournalism work. For Unzueta, a Los Angeles–based freelancer known for his black-and-white portraits of homeless veterans, spending time with active-duty service members was a new experience.
“It felt like I was in a completely different world,” Unzueta said via email.
Navigating the ship’s narrow halls and stairways was novel for Geathers, but his experience in the military, he said, made him “100 percent prepared for the experience,” and he felt “right at home” swapping stories and jokes with the service members he met. He took special interest in photographing Marine tattoos and a game of spades.
“It was a reunion of sorts. It felt good to be around fellow warfighters for the first time in a couple of years,” he said via email.
Though Taylor-Lind had embedded with military before as a photojournalist, she was eager to do so this time with no press affiliation and the ability to communicate directly with her own online audience. Once on board the ship, she was excited to discover that many of the Marines and Navy personnel were Instagram users, which meant she could tag them in her photos.
“For years, many of the people I photographed didn’t have access to the media I worked for, and as a result didn’t see their images published. One of the most exciting things about using social media, which I believe further democratizes photography, is that I can share the pictures with the people in them,” she said.
