Ship Photographer passes on – and a plea for unique collections

A CAMERA shutter is now still as the renowned ship photographer, Ian Shiffman, passed over the side last week.

- BRIAN INGPEN

For years, he was among ship photographers who faithfully recorded arrivals and departures in Cape Town harbour, producing exquisite images of ships, some adorning international maritime news sheets and shipping journals.

Shiffman's thousands of carefully preserved colour transparencies, photographs, videos, and digital images reflected Cape Town's shipping movements from 1953 when, as a 10-year-old schoolboy, he initially took black-and-white images of ships.

He took his first colour transparencies the following year, and, like other shipping enthusiasts, was ecstatic when the Suez Canal closed on two occasions to divert hundreds of ships to pass before his lenses.

A serious setback occurred some years ago when much of his collection was destroyed by a fire that gutted a storage facility in which the collection was housed temporarily.

Painstakingly, Shiffman reconstructed that collection, and expanded it vastly to rank among the world's most renowned and extensive collections. When an especially interesting ship was leaving the harbour, I recall him taking his photographs at A Berth before jumping in his car - a Chrysler Barracuda or something equally smart - negotiating the grain and fish trains shunting across the road near the present Synchrolift, and driving onto the breakwater to photograph the vessel as she gathered speed in the fairway and into the swell.

Sadly, security hawks dashed such healthy exuberance from any shipping enthusiasts by inexplicably closing the breakwater, even to pedestrians!