I have to thank the blog Yorokobu.es for inviting me to read this article about Ian Hughes and his Love Boats Rejects. Ian Hughes is a documentary photographer, who worked for more than 8 years as a cruise ship photographer and who has a website with much of this material.
Photos can be viewed at Love Boats Rejects, a project that works since 2002, and that you can see on this page: http://www.ianhughesphotos.com/loveboat_gallery.html, without a doubt they are the photos that you would never want to see on your facebook wall.
These photos are not the typical ones that you will find in the cruise catalogs, they hardly have to do with the ones that I myself post on this blog, but they show that funny and "crappy" side that also exists on cruise ships, as defined the photographer himself "is a tribute to the baroque hedonism of the cruises of the past" and is that in the 90s, without mobile phones or selfies, professional photographers on board were the most demanded in the dining room.
It was the time when on a large ship there were up to nine photographers who spent 15 hours a day, 7 days a week, hovering among tourists, eager to build memories to frame. Then those photos were placed in a cork, In view of all. Many images stayed there, hanging by a pin, forgotten and ignored even by their own protagonists. Ian Hughes has rescued them, and now he shows the funniest in Love Boats Rejects.
The authorship of Love Boats Rejects is a community work, in which Hughes has selected the photos, regardless of their author and represent an almost nostalgic time for cruise ships.