Port of Ghent: Fourth Section, Regular Services

To make these dynamic views of the Port of Ghent, Nikolai Kossikoff took an acrobatic approach, scaling ships and machinery with a cumbersome view camera in tow. As he recalled in his autobiography, "It was a strange experience when the crane I was on started to swing to the right, as if it was trying to shake me off! But I loved the sport and was fascinated by the result…"


Such risks paid off, yielding oblique perspectives that dramatize the activity of the shipyard. They appear here cut and pasted into a maquette for a 1935 annual report about the harbor. Arranged into sequence and integrated with text, Kossikoff’s photographs illustrate the movement of freight and laborers, for a publication circulated among business executives and layman investors. The 1935 report was of particular importance, coinciding with a transportation-themed international expo in Brussels, as well as a planned dock expansion project poised to increase the port’s international traffic.


Kossikoff’s maquettes argue persuasively for the importance of the port, synthesizing a range of relevant experience; the Kharkiv-born artist first studied engineering, and his pictures reflect a specialist’s eye. Fleeing the Russian Revolution in 1917, he traveled to North Africa and then Paris before settling in Ghent, finding intermittent work as a manual laborer and later as a painter. As he took up professional photography, he synthesized encounters with the Parisian avant-garde with the hard-edged experiments then emerging from the Soviet Union. His rich, graphic prints transcend their illustrative role, harnessing the raw energy of the industrial worksite.