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The Photography of Joe Platko

A few inches of water is the entire distance between two worlds. Joseph Platko has spent twenty years working between this line.

An underwater and nature photographer based in Monterey, California, Platko came to the camera through science. He studied marine ecology for his B.S., then turned almost immediately to underwater photography: a picture made at the surface is only ever a picture of a surface, and he wanted to work inside the systems he had been studying from outside. But the pull of the wild does not stop at the waterline. The landscape above is every bit as inspiring, another world to explore, and he moves between the two with the same restless curiosity. The camera also offered something the research could not… an argument. Advocacy has been the point from the beginning. He photographs these places because they are gorgeous, and because no one knows to care until it is in front of them.

Platko has been a core contributor to the Rigs to Reefs program, which converts decommissioned offshore oil platforms into permanent reef habitat: steel to sanctuary. His film for the program screened before Congress in support of lasting ecological policy, and his work has been featured in The New York Times and National Geographic. His most recent exhibition, Metamorphosis, was a meditation on the kelp of the Monterey Peninsula, using a Rorschach-like approach to 35mm film to address both the degradation of the kelp and the degradation of our vision of it. Across the same two decades, he has been a teacher, a student, and an avid supporter of photography and the arts.

His eye arrives from two directions. Contemporary photographers, Chuck Davis, Jason Bradley, and Ryuijie place him in an artist lineage along the coast; photographers of water and natural form for whom craft and tonal control are inseparable from the image. From Brett Weston comes abstraction: natural detail pressed until it turns into pure form. From Hiroshige and Eyvind Earle comes a sense of design: flattened layered planes, water and weather rendered as pattern and the rhythm of repeating form.

Big Sur gives none of it up easily. The coast asks for effort to enter and more to photograph — hard entries, extensive training, conditions that are difficult and often simply unworkable. For most people, these images are nearly impossible. What the work asks in return is patience, and a kind of listening: to the hum of the surf, the whispering of the mountains, and the murmurs of the tides.

Joe Platko’s photos are on display at The Post Gallery and Sierra Mar.