Output details

Leviathan or the whale

Research content/process:

Leviathan began with two objectives: pursuing my childhood interest in whales, newly re-awakened by visits to Cape Cod, and an equivalent, connected interest in Herman Melville and the writing of Moby-Dick. Fieldwork in New England and the Azores included interaction with scientists and naturalists, and acting as a volunteer guide on whale-watching boats with Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies and Espaco Talassa respectively. In the UK, I consulted Hull Maritime Museum, the Zoological Society of London, and the Natural History Museum as I continued to trace the vexed and often violent relationship between human and whale. As I realized, this relationship has changed dramatically in my lifetime from regarding these animals as an industrial resource to seeing them as a barometer of environmental threat.

Melville’s own story, and the digressive nature of his writing, is reflected in the structure of my own book. I was above all keen to represent the image of the whale, and how it had changed in reaction to the way we perceived/needed/abused/loved it. Part of the formative process of my work was to take tens of thousands of photographs during my many trips at sea. I evolved this new method of working and writing in order to incorporate the disparate nature of my sources and experiences. The resulting mixture of text and image is essentially a creative one, and is coloured by my moving between different disciplines. The book hovers between fiction and non-fiction, and the disciplines of historiography, science, and art.