Our Ocean’s Edge

California made history with the creation of the nation’s first statewide system of ocean parks – a network of 124 Marine Protected Areas stretching from Oregon to the Mexico border. Like national parks on land, MPAs are magnificent in beauty and wildness while providing protection for wildlife, solutions to climate change, and recreational resources for all. Soon after the system was established, photographer Jasmine Swope set out to capture the essence of the marine parks. Her quest took her up and down California’s 1,100-mile long coastline. The result is “Our Ocean’s Edge,” a photographic documentary project coupled with original narratives written by author Dwight Holing that celebrates these fragile seascapes while increasing awareness about their natural benefits and inspiring conservation action. This beautiful clothbound monograph comprises 55 plates beautifully printed in duotone, and opens with a foreword by Wallace J Nichols. A special edition, featuring a signed original photograph presented with a copy of the book in a custom clamshell box, is also available.
Swope’s photographs have the soft look of richly worked, large-scale graphite drawings. In addition to her chosen printing technique, it is achieved through lengthy exposures that blur contours, enhance atmospherics and blend the motions of waves and birds into gentle near-abstractions. One result is to recast familiar sights, recorded in millions of snapshots of tourist scenery, into something alien and almost extraterrestrial. Rocky outcroppings rising above foggy gray swirls of luminosity might be on some far-off mountaintop or even on a Hollywood backlot. They’re like mysterious landscapes glimpsed on another planet. That they’re actually close to home makes the visual estrangement salutary. Swope’s camera can only show the world’s surface; however lovely the outward appearance might be, the complex but largely hidden dynamic of a habitat is what matters. Her photographs deftly evoke the presence of more than the eye can see.