WELCOME ABOARD
As cruise ship photographers, it was our job to photograph the passengers in various locations on and off the ships throughout their cruises. We printed every picture and displayed them for sale in the onboard photo galleries. At the end of each cruise, after taking a few thousand pictures between us, I would have a quick look along the gallery walls at the unsold pictures, and before they were thrown away, I picked out any that made me laugh. This is a selection of those pictures.
I try not to poke fun at people, but when you take that many pictures of people week in, week out, some of them turn out funny. It can be down to funny facial expressions, hairdos, body language or juxtapositions - we've all looked unintentionally funny in photographs. I'm grateful to all the passengers in these photos for still making me smile over 30 years after we took them.
I kept these 5"x7" prints in a tatty old box under my bed for a decade before posting a few of them on this website. In 2015, a press agency contacted me to say that they thought the pictures were worthy of a wider audience. I answered a few quick questions about them and the next morning my neighbour texted to say that his wife was looking at them in the Metro newspaper on the train to London. They'd gone viral. I walked into the work canteen and found double-page features about them in most of the daily newspapers. Over the next few weeks, I was getting loads of emails from all over the world asking about them. They were particularly popular in Germany, being featured in Stern and Spiegel. A Hamburg dentist explained that his patients had been chuckling away after seeing them in his waiting room magazines. He was an avid photo collector and he wanted to buy all the prints. I had to keep the originals but I made copies for him.
You can see links to a few of those publications at the bottom of the gallery page. I hope you enjoy these pictures too.