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Pictures of the Floating World
by Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio
February 21, 2004

A couple recline on a six-star cruise ship. It's part of an exhibition of photographs by Colleen Mullins examining a favorite leisure activity of the enormously wealthy, the pleasure cruise. The show is called "Pictures of the Floating World." (photo courtesy of Colleen Mullins)

Photographer Colleen Mullins wants to take people into a secret world. It's a place where the enormously wealthy go to play. For two years, Mullins aimed her camera at passengers on luxury cruise ships. The result is "Pictures of the Floating World," on display at Creative Electric Studios in Minneapolis.

	At Play

Minneapolis, Minn. — Society's elite recreating at sea doesn't seem like a subject documentary photographers would want to capture. But Colleens Mullins isn't necessarily a documentary photographer. It's just that a few years ago her mother, a veteran luxury cruise ship traveler, started bugging Mullins to come along too.

"I finally agreed," Mullins says. "I said OK, if we could go at Christmas. You know, a little holiday time when it's really bad here, and we could go somewhere warm, and we could have separate rooms, I'd maybe go. And she went for it."

Five-star cruise ships are generally regarded as the most opulent, luxurious vessels on the ocean. Mullins and her mother boarded a six-star cruise ship. Six star ships boast more service.

Much more.

Imagine how you're attended to flying first class, then multiply it a few times. Only the fabulously wealthy can afford it. Being a photographer, Mullins started clicking.

	Colleen Mullins self-portrait

"At first I had this sort of disdainful eye for why anybody would need this," she says. "And so my photographs were kind of interesting and edgy, I thought, for about two days, maybe two and a half. And then I just kind of slipped into the 'Where is that person that's supposed to be serving me?' mode. You know, the disdain mixed with the absolute pleasure in it all."

Mullins mother kept inviting her on these six star cruise getaways, and Mullins kept shooting her fellow passengers cavorting on the ship. The images in "Pictures of the Floating World" are all in black and white. If they were to be placed in some kind of category, Mullins says it would be social documentary.

"There's something about the thin line between recreation photographs and something that says little bit more," she says. "And I think maybe that's where they are interesting to me. That I was sort of capturing these people that essentially were captains of industry, who have nothing more for two weeks to talk about than where their next cruise will be."

By captains of industry, Mullins means extremely successful people. Many are retired. We see them mainly at night, often in formal attire, drinking, conversing, partying. One picture is somewhat reminiscent of the old TV show, 'The Love Boat.' Somewhat.

"Well, that's a captain," Mullins says, "But that's not his wife. And that's the captain's wife, but that's not the captain."

	A luxury cruise ship captain at work

Mullins then acknowledges the captain has his hand in what some might view as an inappropriate area.

"Well, it has proximity perhaps to an inappropriate area," she explains. "Perhaps he was guiding her somewhere!"

She's not entirely convincing.

Several of the women on the ship are widows. In the corner of the gallery, there's a series of photos of them dancing with men who are hosts, paid by the cruise line to cut a rug with the female passengers.

"There's this whole social dynamic of the dancing women, who have their favorite hosts, and they kind of line up waiting cause the hosts aren't allowed to ask the same woman twice to dance in a row," Mullins says.

	Colleen Mullins, ashore

"And so there's this sort of sweet, I don't know, moment sometimes where you can tell the host is actually enjoying it, just as much as the woman who just sort of misses her husband, is just sort twirling around, really misses dancing with somebody she knows."

"Pictures of the Floating World" isn't an indictment of an excessive lifestyle. While Mullins witnessed quite a bit of "rich-people-going-berserk-because-their-scrabble-board- is-missing" type of behavior, she met a lot of people she grew to like.

"I'm looking over your shoulder at a photograph of a man and his girlfriend of 14 months," she says. "They're from Vegas and he taught Marilyn Monroe how to sing happy birthday."

Mullins says she's noticed in the photographs an artificiality in the passengers attempts to have fun. For them vacation doesn't mean taking a break, it's a ritual of the priviledged.

"I see something that's maybe about aging and about a bleakness," Mullins says. "There's this book I read in high school called 'Rosales.' It was this utopian society where everyone had everything but no one was happy. And this is kind of a little bit what I see in these pictures is sort of a bleakness."

Pictures of the Floating World is on display at Creative Electric Studios through March 6th. Around that time Mullins will be on the high seas again, cruising the Caribbean and taking pictures.

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