Silent World – Saratoga, 2018

Silent World – Saratoga captures the sunken kitchen of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, now resting at the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. Once a symbol of military might, the vessel was scuttled during Operation Crossroads, a series of atomic tests conducted in 1946 to study the effects of nuclear explo­sions on warships. Since its descent into the depths, the ship’s carcass has been slowly transforming, its steel hull becoming a new substrate for marine life, an artificial reef where nature quietly reclaims the remnants of human ambition. Taken as part of First Light (2016), a photographic series created over a month and a half of fieldwork at Bikini Atoll, this image documents Charrière’s extensive dives into the wreckage left by the U.S. Navy. The photograph Silent World – Saratoga presents an eerily familiar yet estranged scene: plates left behind in the ship’s galley, frozen in time as if awaiting a meal that will never come. It is a moment of domesticity suspended in the abyss, a quiet echo of the lives once sustained aboard a vessel now submerged in history.

Beyond its immediate stillness, Silent World – Saratoga engages with broader themes of environmental change and cultural memory. The wreck, partially entombed by rising seas, serves as both artifact and living ecosystem—an object oscillating between ruin and renewal, history and biology. The photograph challenges the inherited romantic dichotomy between nature and culture, pre­senting a world where the two are no longer distinct. Instead, the scene dissolves into a continuum where human traces merge with marine life, where the detritus of war becomes a site of regeneration, and where the ocean holds, in its depths, the future memories of the Anthropocene.