Fleet Week: A Maritime Tradition
How military service members navigate between institutional authority and personal freedom during their temporary immersion in New York City’s civilian life.
Fleet Week follows uniformed service members as they move through Manhattan away from ships, formations and official ceremony. The city offers leisure, spectacle and anonymity, but the uniform continues to carry institutional meaning.
The photographs focus on that unresolved double position. A sailor can be tourist, friend or reveler while still appearing as a representative of military authority. Posture loosens, groups disperse and civilian interactions take over, yet discipline never fully leaves the frame.
Rather than presenting Fleet Week as seamless cultural exchange, the series looks at how identity shifts without becoming free of its symbols. It asks what happens when a public institution is encountered through individual bodies at rest, off duty and briefly absorbed into the city.
