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Are the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and many other man-made structures of historical importance not inherently graves too? Fair enough when there's still s
by BoxOfRain 5y ago
Are the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and many other man-made structures of historical importance not inherently graves too? Fair enough when there's still survivors alive, but for really old wrecks I don't think anyone can reasonably claim to have been meaningfully harmed by such activities. If "it's a bit morbid" was a valid criterion for not recording something, then many of the most famous and historically significant photographs and films in existence wouldn't exist.
Obviously the really famous wrecks like Lusitania and Titanic get exclusively professional attention and rightly so, but there's literally thousands of others which never will be recorded by professional archeologists and will soon simply be rust stains on the seabed. Not all of them necessarily represent tragedies either, for example there's a very interesting shipwreck in the Thames Estuary of a pirate radio ship called the Mi Amigo which was successfully evacuated and left to sink once the crew were saved. There's a lot of history there slowly rusting away which could be preserved in a sense.
I realise some people might be squeamish around this subject but as someone with an interest in historic ships I think such remote photography expeditions would on balance be a good thing. Ethically speaking I don't think it's materially different from land-based "urban exploring" which sometimes deals with morbid subjects, the Chernobyl exclusion zone being one of the most well-known target of urban explorers but there's also lots of other examples.