They belong in the water. Boats and ships look lost when they are on land. Of course, there are always reasons for snatching them from their element – to repair them, to clean the hull, to keep them from wintering in freezing water; or they are old, no longer needed, and sometimes given new purposes: as a restaurant, a landmark in a harbor, or a sculptural installation on a traffic island.

Sometimes they dock in places that don’t make sense in any way. Ships have been standing abandoned in a meadow or lying in the desert for years. Nobody knows anymore how they got there. Who once owned them and why they were put there.

There are many more ships on land than you think. They can be found everywhere. Often near waters, in dried-up lakes, of course, but again and again in the mountains or in areas that are out of the way, sometimes many miles from rivers or seas. I track down these ships. I’m interested in places where they seem like surreal apparitions. Dreamlike. I rarely go to ship graveyards.