Greg Vore

MANDVI, INDIA- I have photographed throughout parts of India since 2007. During this time, I have explored the landscape the culture and worked on learning the Hindi language. On a recent visit, I photographed this story about a shipyard on the western coast of Gujarat. The harbor in the town of Mandvi is littered with dozens of wooden ships in various sizes. The largest of which, the 2,000-year-old Arab Dhow, resembles what I imagine Noah’s Ark to have looked like. This behemoth is stunning not only in size but in construction. The ship stands four stories tall and is built almost entirely of Malaysian Sal Wood, all milled and shaped in the harbor by hand. During construction, the ship is propped up by scrap wood scaffolding and held together by what look like crucifixion spikes and set on a mound of earth ten feet above the high tide mark. Once major construction is completed, the ships are released from the scaffolding and tugged out to the edge of the harbor during high tide.  Here the ships wait a larger tugboat that will deliver them to Dubai where they will be finished and first set sail. Sails once powered the Dhow and navigation was done with a sextant. This practice fell away in the early nineteen seventies. Today diesel engines and GPS are the new way.  Ship building in Mandvi however is not new; it’s a 400-year-old tradition