Martin Machado

Martin Machado’s always been drawn to the sea. “As a kid, I wanted to be from Santa Cruz,” he says. Even though he was landlocked in San Jose, he sought out the coast as a teenager, working on a tall ship in the San Francisco Bay. “The sea stuff…it always just stuck with me.”

Now as an adult, Machado’s at sea a handful of months out of the year, working as a commercial fisherman or crossing open water on container ships.

He set out to accumulate experience, but he naturally began accumulating stories, too. “I started making photographs as a way of remembering what I had seen,” he says. It’s not very different from Captain Cook, and other explorers’ sea voyages in the 1700s: capturing the sights and subjects at ports of call all over the world.

Martin’s mixed media—photographs and paintings that resemble etchings—borrow tropes from those early artist documents, and when you look closely at his subjects, you can see the echo of passed time. “We think of the world as a very different place now,” Machado says, “but I think history repeats itself.”